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In her Variety column today, Anne Thompson contrasts Sam Mendes’ star-studded, Oscar-positioned, somewhat tonally revisionist adaptation of Revolutionary Road with the work and life of author Richard Yates. Thompson reminds what unlikely source material this is for a re-teaming of the beautiful young stars of the highest grossing film of all time, relating in detail the plight of “the long-suffering Yates,” who lived in “squalid” solitude, never sold more than 12,000 copies of a single novel, and hated the only produced film his writing ever had anything to do with.
In his day, Yates was asked by its editor to stop submitting fiction to the New Yorker, a publication which had no use for the writer’s “mean-spirited view of things.” In describing how Mendes and crew revised the material to make its protagonists “warmer and more sympathetic” (and chose to take their dreams seriously where Yates drily mocked and criticized), Thompson implies that Hollywood has no use for the acid element of Yates’ view, either.
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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Yes, but I still want to know how it compares to Mad Men? Has the success of the show have any effect on Revolutionary Road?
I’ve had a particularly shitty day, and reading this has made it that much more worse.
John: I want to save a full exploration of this for my review, but a) RR is as over-designed as MM but, and I think probably rightly, where MM is over-designed for glamour, RR is over-designed for plainness; and b) RR is not as interested in ambiguity and subtext as I would argue MM is. But then, some people read MM as being completely shallow, so this may be up for argument.
Filmbrain: I don’t think RR is bad (and it’s certainly not as disappointing as some of the year’s more ambitious end of the year releases), but until the last 20 minutes or so (which are devastating), it takes the language of the book much more literally than I think it should.
It’s just the attitude of it all that fills my head with violent thoughts. Heaven forbid someone should a bit acidic……
More spoon-fed sweetness for us all. Hell, even AUSTRALIA was tweaked to give us a happy ending!
I’m gonna go drink whiskey and watch HUSBANDS.
First: I apologize for my grammatical mistake. I’ve had a killer headache today.
When I recently saw Quantum of Solace with my girlfriend, during it she said “why does it all look like a watch commercial?” And when I’ve watched the trailer for Revolutionary Road, I’ve thought “why does it all look like an advert for Restoration Hardware?”
The production design and cinematography of Mad Men fits because it’s a extension of what those characters do for a living. It advertises the type of fantasy that Don Draper and company are trying to sell. Now I haven’t seen Revolutionary Road, but it seems like production design functions in two ways. First, to recreate the era, but also as another example of a pristine yet empty ‘look’ that Hollywood prides itself on, just like the ‘watch-advertisement look’ of the most-recent James Bond films (or like Sam Mendes’ previous film Road to Perdition).
Are my suspicions correct?