After years of complaining that American directors all wanted to be the next De Palma or Scorsese, but nobody wanted to be Lubitsch, the Siren is finally seeing a favorite director get his moment: Douglas Sirk. Of course, Almodovar loves Sirk, and Fassbinder loved Sirk, and Sirk's visual fingerprints are all over something like 8 Women. But in American movies Sirk has been something of a rarefied taste, championed by John Waters but not many others, until recently. He started creeping back around the time of American Beauty (1999), where Sam Mendes and Conrad Hall created a suburb so lush it might have included some fawns wandering past had the filmmakers not chosen a plastic bag. American Beauty was interesting, because many people seemed to walk away liking it a lot, and then at some point, realized they had been had. The Siren will 'fess up to that reaction, since Glenn Kenny was already man enough to do the same. Then there was Far From Heaven, a better movie. Todd Haynes showed some Sirk love earlier than that, in the brilliant Safe, but Far from Heaven was an attempt to make a Sirk movie without the Production Code getting in the way, and it turned out worthwhile, if short of a masterpiece. Now on television there's Mad Men, which tries for The Apartment's bite in the office scenes and Sirk in the houses and bedrooms, though it is about twenty times more dour than either director ever thought about being.
So when the Siren's email turned up an invitation from an extremely nice publicist to go see Revolutionary Road, the Sam Mendes film adapted from Richard Yates' novel, she immediately thought, "Great idea. 1950s suburbia--why, I'll compare it to Sirk. That's what I'll do."
We've somehow been conditioned to look at a lushly photographed 1950s bedroom community and think Sirk, but Sirk's classic late melodramas didn't deal much with the middle class. Frequently his main characters are wealthy or about to become so, as in Imitation of Life, Written on the Wind and Magnificent Obsession. Even All That Heaven Allows, the most suburban of Sirk's movies, shows Jane Wyman as upper-middle enough to be part of the country-club set. Other characters, as with Rock Hudson in Heaven, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner in Imitation and the flyers in Tarnished Angels, labor physically with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Characters like Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, toiling at medium-paying office jobs that are dependable, but suck the soul, are not as common. Rather, Sirk uses the glittering trappings that his producer Ross Hunter craved, and repeatedly demonstrates that a life of easy material comfort is still a life that American society can smother with appalling ease.
Sirk never met a flourish he was afraid to use, provided it had grace and beauty. The Siren loves nothing better than to sit and watch as the master throws it all at her--angel choirs, mirror shots, splashes of primary color, elegant widescreen shots giving way to close-ups as the music swells, Rock Hudson carrying around a sign marked "Danger," the camera down low to catch every twitch of Dorothy Malone's negligee or Susan Kohner drop-kicking a stuffed animal. The surface is so dazzling the films become subtle, as you are forced to look for the critiques behind the silk curtains.
But here is something that can go ignored in discussions of Sirk: He often does allow individuals their victories. They're trying, good lord they are trying so hard, and Sirk respects that. There's nothing like the exceptional nastiness in American Beauty's depiction of the Marine next door or, for that matter, poor Annette Bening. There are selfish and cruel characters, certainly, like Jane Wyman's children in All That Heaven Allows, but Sirk's camera shows them as stunted and conformist, not as gargoyles. And in the end, as in most classic melodramas, love is allowed its moment of triumph. Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson manage to stay together at the end of All That Heaven Allows. Rock Hudson drives off with Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind, as they both escape the tentacles of the Hadley money. Rock Hudson breaks through his callow narcissism and finds a vocation, as well as Jane Wyman, in Magnificent Obsession.
You can argue that these endings are intended ironically, but the Siren thinks not. They are shaded, certainly, by what we know about the forces arrayed against the characters, but they are still, as Lawrence Quirk argued for All That Heaven Allows, "paeans to individualism and spiritual freedom." When Sirk needed a tragic ending, he gave us one, as in Imitation of Life, where the characters had to be crushed by the American psychosis about race. To suggest otherwise would be laughably phony, and phony is something Sirk never was. Flamboyant, yes, flashy even--false, never. To find falseness in Sirk means you aren't looking hard enough.
If you try to grasp happiness itself, your fingers only meet a surface of glass, because happiness has no existence of its own, and probably exists only inside yourself.
--Douglas Sirk, quoted in The Bad and the Beautiful
So the trouble with the Siren's game plan was that Revolutionary Road is only partially Sirkian. And that long introduction was a tangent, but as the Siren explained to Glenn Kenny, the urge to discuss Sirk sometimes just takes over. Here we come to that rara avis on the Siren's blog, a new movie.
Revolutionary Road is beautiful to look at, but its visual style (via DP Roger Deakins) is unobtrusive. There are no Mad Men-style "how cool, that is SO period" flourishes. And that's good; you shouldn't be sitting there wondering where can you get a dress just like Kate's. This is a chamber piece, dependent on the filmmaker's ability to draw you into a couple's claustrophobic marriage. Sirk managed that even as he used an extremely strong style, but it is hardly fair to a filmmaker to say he isn't Sirk. The Siren misses the presence of an extraordinary directorial vision, as did Dan Callahan in his perceptive review, but Revolutionary Road is still a good, though not great, movie. Mendes' decision to get out of the way, as Dan puts it, lets the movie swoop in on Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio, both of them as good as they've ever been. The movie is also aided immeasurably by a supporting cast (notably Kathy Bates and a superb Michael Shannon) who must carry a lot of the thematic load, but can do so only in small, telling scenes.
Let it be known that the Siren has not read the book, although now she wants to. Several reviewers have said the movie is a different experience for someone who loved the book, but alas, that is always so. Plot summary doesn't take long. It's 1955. Frank and April Wheeler once dreamed of a life of ideas and importance, leading to some sort of vaguely bohemian, and special, destiny. Now they have two children and live in a house in a Connecticut suburb. April feels life closing in on them; Frank less so, but he certainly feels April's unhappiness. April hatches a plan to ditch it all and move to Paris where she believes, with passionate delusion, she will easily obtain a high-paying secretarial job and Frank will find something to do other than sell stuff he doesn't believe in to people and companies he doesn't give a damn about. As do the characters around the Wheelers, we suspect the plan is DOA. And indeed it is, strangled as Frank's cursory performance at work leads him to a promotion, and April's temporary joy in her marriage leads her to pregnancy. Like the sharks in Moby Dick, the spouses encircle and consume one another, the wife's desperation growing as the husband embraces his fate.
The Wheelers' harrowing arguments are full of the precision cruelty you can experience only with someone you love. Few longtime couples will be able to sit through the scenes without at least one small déjà vu, even if the Siren did frequently wonder why the children never showed up in the middle of things as they do in most small houses. Mendes just ignores the kids as his movie bears down on the marriage. In this world, children are a sideline. They cannot fulfill your life and indeed, their mere existence can ruin it. That is why the Siren found one small part of the denouement out of key, even before she found out that it wasn't from Yates.
Revolutionary Road is a much better movie than American Beauty, simply because you have room to breathe when it comes to how you see the characters. The Siren, for example, didn't find Frank as much of an asshole as many others did. Di Caprio, who's never been able to show menace, sure can show other things. There's the scene where Frank has lunch with his smug, coarse boss (Jay O. Sanders) and asks if the man remembers his father, who worked for the same company for more than 20 years. The boss gives an indulgent smile and repeats the name, as though searching his memory for a lost umbrella, and Di Caprio's look shows us both what Frank fears, and what he will nonetheless become.
Winslet is even better; she breaks your heart. She's grown into her lovely face, which used to suggest a Victorian painting even when she was in a modern movie. Now Winslet can play April and be transparent as rainwater for most of the movie, as in an early scene where she stands in the foyer after Frank has left for work, holding her washrag and staring at the pointless drudgery of the day as though it walked in before he closed the door. We read April so easily for so long, that we do become angry with Frank for turning away from the obvious. Then, toward the end, when April despairs, it's like someone switched off the lights, and in Winslet's face and gestures we can no longer find anything to read. Like Frank and the neighbors, we have to piece together April's thoughts from her final actions.
Sirk's pointed critiques of conformity apply to more than his own time, more than just the U.S. And while at least one crucial plot point in Revolutionary Road is tied to the era, it isn't just a slam at the 1950s. Charles Peguy said the only tragedy was not to be a saint; in Revolutionary Road the tragedy is to discover that you are not an artist. Like Sirk, in David Thomson's phrase, "social decorum smothers love and lovers;" unlike Sirk, in this movie an individual doesn't stand a chance. There's another, and possibly more apt, comparison to be made, with King Vidor's towering The Crowd and its hero who must learn to accept his place among "the seven million that believe New York depends on them." But that movie tells us there is meaning and love to be found in the simple stages of a life--childhood, courtship, marriage, children--and courage in the finding. Revolutionary Road sees each stage as another key turning in another iron door.
(Revolutionary Road opens Dec. 26 in limited release.)