Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.
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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.
When Activision was bought by Vivendi a couple of months back, the conglomerate declined to release the highly-anticipated 
