RR: I didn't have the same problem Anne B had with the scene just mentioned (though I know she knew from the book what the object was). As someone who has not read the book, I pretty much figured out what it was before it was shown, based on the context of scenes leading up to it. I do agree w/Anne B that the problem is not the suburbs; it's the Wheelers.

Joan & the City: She does love the city (or did), though how much of her line in "Babylon" is just to press Roger's buttons is anyone's guess. She starts making a turn in "The Long Weekend" that starts pointing her away from Roger (which is accelerated by his heart attack). Her (justifiable) upset over Paul copying and posting her Driver's License might suggest that her marriage clock was ticking for some time. The doc might have seemed like a good catch, but even early on Joan is watching Jackie's White House tour while he's trying to make out with her. And as much as she loves (or loved) the city, she did tell Peggy in the pilot that the goal was to be out of the city.

I'd be impossible anywhere, though. Demanding is a hard trait to file down, and I have tons of it.

The point of Revolutionary Road is that the suburb doesn't matter, the name of the road doesn't matter; not even Paris matters. Those two people, April and Frank, would be miserable anywhere, because they do not fit.

Even if the stuff that happens in the film didn't happen, no plan April and Frank ever made would work. No home would be right for them. They could dream their lives away, be the hit of every party until the dawn of the Sixties; no matter. They'd still be doomed. And if they did by some miracle escape their suburb and move to Paris, they'd hate it.

It's not about the suburb. It's about them. It often is.

My issues with the suburb I grew up in have something to do with your impressions of racial separation, hullaballoo. Since I left Southern California, I haven't really checked to see whether that limiting world I remember has changed. I'm sure it has. Everything else does.

FWIW, carocat, a lot of the dialogue in Revolutionary Road does come from the book. And we are not subjected to a few scenes from that novel — scenes that, if included, might have destroyed the film (Frank's mistress cooks dinner for him; Frank, a child, has lunch with his father and his boss). It wasn't, as I've said, an easy read.

Good direction involves knowing what to include and what to leave out. I think RR was well enough directed. But a great director can very simply communicate some of what gets past us in this film: the humid sense of place, for one. The restrictions of the time, for another.

There's a scene where Frank finds something April has bought and planned to use, from the pharmacy; it enrages him. We don't know what it is or why it upsets him. Until Frank uses a certain word, holding that object in his hand, we don't get it at all. Could we have seen April buying that object? Just to understand?

Maybe their fight over that object was an effective use of screen time. I don't know, not being a director myself, how to do it better. But what if there's a way? What if you're already spending millions of dollars? What the hell? Try it.

It's only art. It's only transportingly beautiful, if done right …

I don't know that I would really call Joan "miserable," though. Yes, she has an asshole rapist fiance, but I think she may be more disenchanted or stoic than miserable. And it certainly isn't because she lives in the city. In fact, she actually likes that aspect. In season 1, at least, she enjoyed her life, and loved New York. Remember she told Roger that she had parties, she had men over — she was having fun. And what did she say to Carol? "This city is everything."

Trudy is married to Pete. That would make anyone miserable. But I think she likes where she lives. That big apartment on the Upper East Side? Who wouldn't like that?

For me, one of the issues I have about the suburbs — especially during the time of Mad Men and Revolutionary Road — is that they were havens for White Flight. Negroes, Jews, and others needed not apply. These so-called "planned" communities served as a shield to Whites from the encroaching "otherdom" that they encountered in the cities. It was a way for them to live in an unreal world, enabling them to avoid the inevitable, and served as an excuse for some bad behavior. Unfortunately in certain communities, some of that residue still exists today. YMMV.

The country is more beautiful and natural, but it's not so convenient. And ^its community plan is certainly no better (unless you've managed to be self-sustaining). The city is way more happening and cultural, but it's not for everyone.

I agree with Karl. The problems with these people's lives are personal and cultural, but not geographical.

Nonetheless, I have lived in the suburbs for thirteen years now, and I have not actually rotted.

Remember “Poltergeist”? Now there was a great evil-suburbs movie. That pretty much defined the genre, in a neat, don’t-go-near-the-unfinished-swimming-pool-when-it’s-raining kind of way.

We who were young and living in the suburbs when that film came out have known, ever since, what buying into a planned community would mean:
* screwed-up cable
* contractors ogling your teenage daughters
* carnivorous outdoor plants
* not ever really being able to get the house “clean”
* having neighbors who hang around … well, forever

The principle of that film — you bastard! You moved the headstones, but you didn’t move the bodies!! — is pretty much the guiding principle of suburbia itself.

So why do so many people still live there?

Because it’s pretty. You’ll see this, if you see “Revolutionary Road”: the Wheelers live in a nice home in a lovely neighborhood. If you didn’t know about suburbs (headstones, bodies, etc.), you’d want to live there. You’d sure want to raise your kids there.

But this is what’s true about the suburbs in “Revolutionary Road”: they ARE lovely. There’s no decay there, not yet. RR stumbles a bit in forgetting that it has to give us the suburbs like this: new, both promising and enervating. The film has to figure out what the suburbs meant in 1955, and also to show them to us without selling them: to make them look as stifling as the Wheelers think they are. Minus modern baggage like mine.

“Poltergeist”‘s 1980′s planned community had the gift of decades of suburban hindsight — as did “American Beauty”. We’re in on the jokes in those films; we don’t have far to look to see what’s really in that rose in the American Beauty tagline, “look closer”. But RR has something to teach us — about those people, in that place and that time, and why April and Frank’s life together is so difficult.

I wish the director had asked us to look closer. I really wanted to see.

I would add that having done American Beauty, Mendes doing RR kept feeling to me like “This guy must really hate the suburbs,” so it’s possible that he assumes the awfulness of suburban life is self-evident, not requiring exposition. Roger Ebert wouldn’t catch this, as he pretty much implies that’s how he feels in his review.