A Great Movie I Saw Last Night

How strange that as I sit down to write this a heaviness descends upon my arms, which feel as though they have weights attached to them.

Last night I saw the Sam Mendes movie Revolutionary Road. Please note the spoiler alert–if you read this you’ll find out what happens.

I’ve never seen a movie that more harrowingly portrays the slow death of adult, in this case suburban, married life–it is something only married people will understand. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play a young Connecticut couple with two kids who fight to reclaim the spark of their early artistic, bohemian days, after he is safely ensconced in a cubicle at a large corporation in Manhattan. Kate Winslet is stunningly brilliant, as the tragic heroine, April Wheeler, who tries to pull her husband out of an insidious careerist trap, by persuading him that the family should move to Paris for a year so he can find his true calling.

I don’t think anybody wins this battle–flies out of the trap, or finds the answer to the dilemma of freedom vs. adult responsibility, once children arrive. The Swedish poet Harry Martinson created the metaphor in his book “Cikada” of a couple who start out in wild desire and end up inside a mountain, hammering to get out. The hammer blows grow ever fainter “…they wanted out, they wanted out…” until they fall silent, and the snow falls quietly over the grey mountain. It serves as a metaphor for so many marriages I’ve witnessed personally. And what’s the answer?

There isn’t one, of course.

Kate and Leo are victims of their flickering dream, of artistic freedom, one that calls them to disaster even though neither of them have a specific talent. But Winslet is herself a work of art, the way her eyes record the dream, then watch it die, through her struggle to restore her husband to what she considers his rightful manhood–who he really is. “Don’t you know?” she says, cradling his face. “You’re the most beautiful thing in the world. You’re a man.”

Except he isn’t.

A man sees danger coming, and wards it off, does what is necessary. Winslet makes it clear that if they don’t go to Paris the family will die, she will die. He does what a 1950s American Man would do–he starts yelling at his wife for her irrationality. He starts to take the corporate bait. He starts to betray her, and himself, and the family, little by little, until everything falls on her, until he can make her seem like the crazy one. He doesn’t see or hear or feel her. Either he is a slightly wooden actor or he is a genius at portraying a slightly wooden 1950s man, but either way, we see that she is the artist, and her art is to carry the truth that nobody else, save the madman on leave from the mental hospital, admits. “Alot of people are onto the emptiness,” he says,”but it takes real courage to admit the hopelessness.”

A third pregnancy is their doom. He permits himself every thundering moral posture starting with blaming her, condemning her when he finds rubber tubes in a bag, calling her insane, calling her a monster and bad mother, yet ensuring that she will be so alone, once he has withdrawn real love, that she will of course perform an abortion on herself, alone in a bathroom. He seduces a secretary and then brings the news to her like a dead mouse, hoping to get a reaction. Implicit of course, is that it’s her fault. Her contempt solidifies.

His manhood now cracking miserably, he smashes around, punches walls, and screams at her that she should have “taken care of it,” before 12 weeks when she had the chance. He calls her a hollow shell of a woman. Rather than recognize the depth of her love for him, that she wanted him to find himself and be everything he ever dreamed of being, fulfill his true potential, rather than find a way for this baby to come into the world without the dream combusting, he simply rails at her for not being a normal, sane, “healthy” woman. But she was. She was a different kind of normal, sane, health woman. She actually wanted to know who her husband really was, as a man. She offered him something that was beyond him. When he failed her, she could no longer give herself.

Who, then, made the “choice?”

Nature is consistent, would you agree? I believe that a woman falls out of love with a man for one reason only: He lets her down. He does so from behind his instruction booklet of how a real woman should behave, and society backs him 100%, but he is only seeding his own expulsion when he attempts to tighten her screws and make her fly differently. She always tells him who she is, and what she needs. He rarely listens. He grows rigid with principles he picked up somewhere that play on his sub-conscious–never to let a woman get too much power, never to “submit” to her, and also never to understand that his own power lies in the strength it takes to see and accept and love her as she is–to accept her nature. He stamps his feet, remains a child, fails to understand the urgency of her stress points until the thing snaps off. Then he blames her with all the artillery of self-pity–a byproduct of his dwelling too close to maternal promises. He is not, after all, her son. He will never understand his role in it all.

April is so right when she says a man is the most beautiful thing in the world. This movie traces the beginning of his inferno–the 1950s. First corporate America, then the pill, and feminism, and now look where we are. I am sitting here in 2008 trying to argue in favor of the concept of a man. You will think I am glorifying female insanity, but I am glorifying instinctive feminine grasp of manhood, which we were complicit in wrecking, and which is the subject of this film.

Of course April is “no angel.” I am not interested in angels, and I hope you aren’t either. I am interested in getting past moral platitudes and back into human nature, as it was before the feminist “revolution,” as it is, as it always will be.

April is no angel–but she is a woman and there is such a thing (just as there is such a thing as a man) and their job, in nature, is to raise boys into men, and for this he must cross lines of fire, alone, with no self-pity. He can only achieve manhood by ceasing to blame the woman, and look at himself, lit up, and real, and, as she says, ‘beautiful.’

Empathy makes him so.

“By the time she did what she did, I did not blame her,” I told my ex-husband, as I fed our cats boiled chicken, after the movie. “She thought she might save them all. That they might make it to Paris, that the dream might live. As a viewer, I was with her, I couldn’t condemn her. I felt an immense sorrow and empathy for her. Nobody understood what she was trying to do, for all of them.”

On their last morning together, after the grisly fight about the pregnancy, she greets him in an apron, with a placid smile, and a full breakfast on the table. She smooths her hands over the apron and bids him good morning. He has already killed her–she is a robot now. They have breakfast like two suburban robots. When he leaves, she sits down at her dressing table, and from the despair in her eyes, we think she is going to commit suicide, which she does, in her way. But when the bleeding starts, she does call an ambulance. She wants to live. “I need help” she says. That her husband, in wild despair in the emergency room, should thunder “She did this to herself,” to the hapless neighbor, shores up the tragedy of her mistake. He was not that most beautiful thing–a man. He did not protect her. He did not do the one thing a man must do to be a man, and that is face the truth. In this society, truth is left to women and madmen. They make excellent scapegoats.

This will be the same debate as the one over Emma Bovary: Many of you will call the woman spoiled, flighty, childish, and selfish. Naturally, having taken the dark road less traveled of the search for a more authentic life, she will perish. A tragic heroine, or a foolish child, or both.

In my eyes, she is the only fully human being in the movie. You can see it in the extraordinary scene where she dances a jitterbug with the lug of a neighbor, agape and lost in the sphere of her power. That dance, and their subsequent backseat tryst, is his one and only spin in the car of honest, dangerous life, and he tells her he loves her.

Director Mendes, Winslet’s husband in real life, finishes this clod off for us too, in the final scene, where he embraces his wife, and says he does not wish to speak of the Wheelers anymore.

The husband if of course wildly admired for being devoted to his own kids, after her death. She is forgotten, like a bad fire. Suburban life, the trap, the theater of thoroughly dishonest and plastic interaction, triumphs, like Martinson’s grey mountain, after the hammers of human yearning have fallen silent.

See it. Think about it. Take the risk of listening to your wives, really listening, rather than the much easier road of exploiting public sympathy over how very tough it is for a man, an American Man, to constantly snuff the fires of the feminine wilderness.