“A man only gets a couple chances in life. If he doesn’t grab them by the balls, before long he’s sitting around wondering how he got to be second rate.”
It’s 1955 and Frank and April Wheeler are living the American Dream—a house in the suburbs, two kids, a decent job. Frank is turning thirty, a time for reflecting on where your life is going. Often it is a time when the realities of life push the dreams of one’s youth away forever. For many people that transition to adulthood has enough blessing to overcome the grief of unlived dreams. For others it is a painful time of realizing they will never be the people they wanted to be.
Revolutionary Road is an immersion in Weltschmerz, often translated as world-weariness. This weariness grows from the disconnect between the ideal world and the real world. For the Wheelers (at least for April Wheeler) that ideal world is represented by Paris. She wants the family to drop out of their seemingly perfect suburban life and go to Paris. There she can work and Frank can be free to discover what he wants to do with his life. Frank is somewhat reluctant, but agrees. Plans are made. But of course the real world will get in the way.
The issue facing the Wheelers is really an existential question of how life should be lived: What is a good life? How does one find happiness and meaning? We know early on that the Wheelers are not happy. They can quickly escalate any conversation into a loud fight. They both have their frustrations. Frank spends his day in a cubicle working for the same company his father worked for. His job seems meaningless in the larger view of things, but it provides a paycheck to support his family.
April feels trapped. In the world they inhabit, her role is limited to wife and mother. It is unheard of for a married woman to work. The culture around her says she should find her fulfillment in family, but she doesn’t. She wants an outlet, but where can she find one? She tries acting in a community play, but that doesn’t help. If only she can get to that ideal world of Paris and reverse their roles.
The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is a search for the meaning of life. Interpreters approach it in various ways. Some see it as providing the answer to the question of meaning; others find it to be a pessimistic denial that meaning can ever be found. Revolutionary Road is the darkest kind of reading of Ecclesiastes. The Wheelers are doomed to never finding the illusive life of their dreams. How can they when they don’t really understand what their dreams are?
I think one of the reasons that Frank seems reluctant to go along with moving to Paris is that, deep inside, he really is already living his dream. He might never admit it, but there is something fulfilling for him in turning into his father. He may even be surpassing his father a bit when he is offered a new, bigger job. He may talk a good dream, but in most ways, he is satisfied with life, even if he can’t quite say so.
It is April who has the hardest time “resigning from life and settling down.” In a pre-feminist age there were many women looking for something more than family. To be limited to a given role can be frustrating, and it was for many. It is her midlife crisis that is front and center in this film. The ’50s were when “happy pills” like Miltown came to suburbia—taking the edge off the constraining reality of that seemingly ideal world. April has nothing to filter the realities of life. She can find no meaning—no reason to stay in “the hopeless emptiness of life here.”
This is a powerful and engrossing film. It quite possibly will be my top film for 2008. Its strength is not based in giving us a look at the emptiness of the ’50s. Its power comes from our seeing ourselves and our own search for life’s meaning. Just as the Wheelers (and the author of Ecclesiastes) struggled with the often stultifying demands and exigencies of the real world, we also often find ourselves wishing for something more fulfilling than the lives we have built. My own reading of Ecclesiastes is that finding the answer to the questions of life is not all that important; asking them is. Revolutionary Road is a dark but first-rate way to ask such questions.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
A bad case of “the grass is always greener somewhere else”. My wife and I seem to be going thru a similar phase in our marriage/life. After living in a large city for 15 years and procreating two kids, I took a job in one of the least populated states in the union, in a city of less than 200,000. My wife hates it. She even hates the people and the culture. So I am under the gun to go somewhere else. I don’t like it much here either, but the truth is that I can adapt to any hellhole and my job pays very well. Ecclesiastes is one of my favorites, it’s been a while since I read it. I find that when I spend too much time in the OT my life gets sour (except for the psalms). The NT gives me life and answers but there is so much sin around and inside (even if forgiven) that even faith, the one needed to live by, becomes weary. In all, I think that without Christ I would be much worse off today, not to mention eternally.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Wow, I hope things don’t get too bad, Eduardo. Hope you don’t mind a prayer or two sent your way.