Revolutionary Road

This is an okay film that suffers by comparison to two superior works, the Richard Yates novel on which it is based, and the tv series Mad Men, which has claimed that era and milieu as its own. I had high hopes when I heard this film was coming out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, so I re-read the 1961 novel to whet my appetite. Yates is deservedly known as a writer’s writer, and indeed I was led to him originally by Joe McGinnis, with whom I became friendly after I wrote a rave review of Fatal Vision. So this film preserves most of the novel, except that which makes it a great book -- the writing. Particularly the excruciatingly nuanced accumulation of shame and humiliation deduced from the workings of self-delusion, the mind in subverted communication with the tongue, and the tongue with others, in a cascade of misrepresentation. Beginning with the same scene, the novel presents the snowballing disaster of a community theater performance in a protracted set piece, but the film shows only the curtain coming down to scattered sarcastic comments from the audience. If you know the book, the movie seems skimpy. If you don’t, it’s likely to seem simplistic and unmotivated, however blistering. Likewise if you know Kate and Leo -- and who does not? -- then it’s hard to see them as these resourceless characters, trapped in a cage of their own illusions. They seem bigger than their cramped circumstances, which is just what the Wheelers were not. When I was reading the book, I couldn’t help seeing April in the guise of Betsy of Mad Men -- January Jones, as pretty, fragile, and hard as porcelain. Ms. Winslet simply has too much substance for the role, and no way is Leo pathetic enough to be Frank. Which is not to disparage their performances, but to point to the misconception that dooms this film from its worthy inspiration to its tasteful semi-tragic conclusion. It’s hard to make a great film from a great book. (2008, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-69.)

That truism might, at a stretch, apply as well to Killshot (2008, dvd, n.) Elmore Leonard is great within the limits of genre fiction, but maybe not as literature. And certainly he has proven amenable to movie adaptation, from Out of Sight and Get Shorty down through the ranks. This one, however, didn’t make it to theaters but went straight to dvd, despite a noteworthy cast of Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and others, plus director John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love fame). Somebody must have made Harvey Weinstein mad, because worse crap than this shows up in cineplexes every week. I think the key element missing from this adaptation is Leonard’s sly humor. The whole femme-in-jeopardy shtick is competently handled, as a woman witness is stalked by two crazy hitmen. But some crucial element of wit and irony is missing. Nonetheless this dumped film strikes as better, not worse, than average.