Monday at the Movies - September 15, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Continuing our string of bizarre coincidences, tomorrow is screenwriter Justin Haythe’s birthday, he of the largely ill-conceived Lone Ranger reboot.

Revolutionary Road (2008) – If you want to remember the postwar era fondly, the door to Turner Classic Movies is that way.  Director Sam Mendes helms this adaptation of the eponymous novel by Richard Yates, and you’ll find it astounding to believe this is the same director behind both Skyfall and American Beauty.  Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, a couple for whom the sheen of marital bliss is quickly cracking; the two deliver reliably solid work, and the tension between the two is divinely palpable.  As unfaltering as these two performances are, they’re also relentlessly depressing.  They’re fantastic performers, and we enjoy them on-screen for it, but good Lord – it’s very trying to watch two of your most beloved thespians berate each other for two hours in a self-destructive, mutually abusive marriage.  The goal here is a warts-and-all exposé on the darker side of the late-40s American optimism, with a heavy dose of Peyton Place thrown in for those who still held the suburbs as idyllic.  On that count, Revolutionary Road is a bleak success, but feel good it ain’t.  To lighten the mood, though, Michael Shannon wanders into the frame every so often, and – as is usually the case with him – it’s as though he’s in an entirely different movie, one I can’t say I wouldn’t rather have watched.  His supporting role as the son of the Wheelers’ realtor neighbor (Kathy Bates) comes with equal parts mental derangement and frightening outburst, a fine and effective complement to the repressed Frank and April.  The real treat is in watching him act, with an occasional tic or bizarre vocal inflection making his the only real fun performance to be had in a film that is creatively successful but otherwise oppressing to watch.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!