COLUMNISTS Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes)
Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri)
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett)
The Broken (Sean Ellis)
A critic trapped by the silent clamour of a white screen, staring at his word processor before starting a review, knows a little how an actor feels when trapped by the clamour and glamour of a speech moment. Panic, helplessness, an awareness of that sea of waiting expectation.
So I just want to say: I haven’t prepared the first sentence of this review of Revolutionary Road, but I would like to thank and pay tribute to screenwriter Justin Haythe, director Sam Mendes and actors Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon and – oh God, who’s the other one? – Leonardo DiCaprio.
Poor Leonardo. He really does get the “oh God, who’s the other one?” role here. Winslet comes up shining with a performance that seems no performance at all, just a miracle of actorly imagination, in this film of novelist Richard Yates’s mid-century American classic that dished the dirtlessness on the 1950s. That was the hygienic decade when suburbia came of age, and prosperity and procreation herded decent upwardly aspiring families into spotless homes. Only the indecent or depth-aspiring rebelled: beat poets, rebel novelists or dissident housewives such as Winslet’s April Wheeler. The wedding rice is barely brushed from April’s blonde hair before she is goading husband Frank (DiCaprio) to quit his computer-marketing job and find a freshening freedom in Paris. Bohemia! Self-fulfilment! There he will find his better self – a writer, an artist – while ex-actress April earns their bread with secretarial work.
April thinks they are a special couple. Actually, they are just neurotics with a faith in their right to the keys to paradise. They don’t have the keys, or the right. But the viewer cannot help savouring the irony – truth being more Nietzschean and less prescriptive than fiction – that Winslet herself (the actress, not the fictive ex-actress) is entirely the chatelaine of her own destiny. In an enactment of the dream denied to April, she reportedly read the script of Revolutionary Road when sent it and fell in love with it; then after an exhaustive search the length and breadth of her living room anointed her husband Sam Mendes as director.
Voilà! What April and Frank cannot do, Kate and Sam can. There is something a little cruel about artists, from Yates to Mr and Mrs Mendes, who bar the door to would-be escapees from life’s toils while enjoying that escape themselves. But April’s psychological condition is fair game. She is an altruist’s Emma Bovary, passionate to confer romance – the romance of freedom – on a husband who, in his few moments of permitted clarity, can only splutter: “Who ever said I was meant to be a big deal anyway?”
It comes to grief: tears, blood, an unwanted pregnancy and the most chilling moment of all, the post-quarrel morning when the wife appears in the kitchen radiant, calm and wreathed in a Stepford smile. “Would you like scrambled eggs or fried?” she asks. Fear comes over the husband’s face. The atmosphere, we recognise, is turning nuclear. This is the endgame.
Winslet’s screen skills get better and better. She seems to emit emotion in radio waves, unseen yet powerful, rather than in outward signs and gestures. DiCaprio by contrast, in a characterisation scored for fervid egotism, hits few notes other than F-sharp for frantic. This DiCaprio is still that kid from Titanic, running around steerage while Winslet glows like a higher life form from the upper deck.
Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins bathe early scenes in a honeyed beige that captures the era’s besieging blandness. But Mendes lacks the skill that Todd Field showed, in the similarly-themed Winslet-starrer Little Children, for making feral moments jump out and bite us. Kathy Bates is good as a “Yoo-hoo” neighbourhood realtor and Michael Shannon briefly brilliant as her maladjusted, motormouthed son, a Shakespearean Fool licensed to skewer verbally the central couple. But Winslet gives Revolutionary Road its depth and heft. That face still gazes at us, with its seraphic blend of beauty and horror, minutes, even hours, after we have left the theatre.
In the failing family at the heart of Tokyo Sonata, a touching and acerbic Japanese drama, it is the breadwinning male – again – who puts the “funk” into dysfunctional. The world of this nine-to-five executive pen-pusher (Teruyuki Kagawa) collapses when he is fired. He cannot lose face by confronting the wife and son with the truth. So suit-and-tied he continues to observe the same hours for leaving and returning home, spending each day seeking work or queuing for street food. Meanwhile the son plays truant from school to take forbidden piano lessons. And the wife feels, as wives can, that since everything she does outside bed and meal hours is forbidden, she might as well play hooky (shopping trips) when she wants.
Former horror filmmaker Kyoshi Kurosawa carries the antic rhythms of that genre into the last reel. The story maxes out its believability credit with a knife attack and kidnapping. The grand guignol is effective, like a dash of cold water in a fainter’s face. Soon the family re-embraces truth, honesty and the Japanese way of getting back in line. This too is surely satirical, though I warmed to the feelgood closure, very Hollywood or kitsch-Hollywood, in which Kurosawa allows the boy his piano dream and an uninterrupted full-length playing – don’t even think of fidgeting – of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”.
The rest of the week is as cuckoo as the approaching herald of spring and as careless or unprincipled about alien nest invasion. In JCVD director Mabrouk El Mechri plants a postmodern egg in the Jean-Claude Van Damme canonic habitat, persuading the Muscles from Brussels to play himself in a heist plot providing ludic riffs on old Van Damme action romps. Witty in bits, noisy in others.
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist lays an egg – in every sense – in the nomenclatural nest once sacred to The Thin Man. That Nick and that Nora (spelled without aspirate) were worth queueing for and giggling at. This Nick (a dopey nerd played by Juno’s Michael Cera, pictured) and Nora (a bee-stung-lips hellion played by Alexis Dziena, who is in danger of growing up to become Courtney Love) are tinny teens dragged through mirth-free misadventures one New York night.
Some filmmakers invite odd eggs into their nests. In The Broken, British writer-director Sean Ellis populates his Body Snatchers-style plot, set in a London where sinister doubles step forth from broken mirrors like hatchlings from cracked shells, with British, Danish, French and American stars. A Babel cast in a piece of free-associative gothic babble.
