I was late to learn that Sam Mendes is directing a film adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1960 suburban noir novel, Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and I’m still trying to be optimistic about the outcome. “Optimism” is not a word one associates with Yates; his stories were so bleak, so rife with defeat and self-delusion and alcoholism that it is small wonder that Hollywood has not tackled him sooner. Unhappy endings often win Oscars — just look at Mendes’ own American Beauty — but they need stars to get the green light. Hence Winslet (who has reportedly wanted to make a movie of RR for years) and DiCaprio, together for the first time since Titanic.
The success of American Beauty (which, like RR, ends with a downer of a death) might seem like a good sign — that was another vision of stagnant suburbia and the dark passions that lie beneath its surface. But that film (written by Alan Ball, who went on to create Six Feet Under for HBO) was all surface itself. Kevin Spacey made us believe in lonely Lester Burnham, the dad with a thing for a high school girl, but the rest of the characters were pretty one-dimensional and Ball’s critique of suburban life was rather shrill and simplistic — in a very sixties kind of way.
What gives Revolutionary Road its staying power is its complexity, and the complicity of the characters in their fate. Frank and April Wheeler have moved to the suburbs of NY and hate themselves for it. They know better, damn it, they’re artists yearning to breathe free (he’s meant to be an author, instead of writing ad copy; she could have been a star on the stage, she believes). They have heard the distant bongos of beat cullture, probably read Henry Miller and want to go live in Paris — but instead of fleeing the air-conditioned nightmare they turn the temperature down. It’s the birth of the New Frontier but they’re not going anywhere. Imagine if the Dick Van Dyke Show had been written by Ibsen and you get the idea.
A few women have told me that they believe April Wheeler is one of the best female characters written by a man in modern literature, and as Blake Bailey noted in his excellent Yates bio, A Tragic Honesty, it was a too-close-for-comfort portrait of Yates’s first wife. He was a keen observer of human nature (as well as a bipolar drunk) and she never forgave him, even though April appears as the more sympathetic character and Frank (a dead ringer for Yates) comes off as the coward.
Winslet, who is wonderful even in bad movies, already grappled with suburban angst in Little Children and may save Mendes’s movie from a counterfeit ending. It would certainly have surprised Yates, who met his share of bullshit artitsts of the Hollywood variety (when he was not being institutionalized) and liked to keep his expectations low. I interviewed him in 1990; he was living beside a bike shop in Westwood in the most barren apartment I have ever seen. Years of hard living had taket their toll; though in his sixties then he appeared at least 20 years older, and the walk up the stairs to a fancy restaurant nearby just about killed him.
His reputation was obscure then; my editors at California magazine had never heard of him, and they were well-read people. Yates was working on a novel that drew on his experiences as a speechwriter for then attorney general Robert Kennedy, in the early sixties but, characteristically, he’d been unimpresssed by RFK and unconvinced of his love of mankind. The book was unfinished when he died a few years later, just as the interest in Hollywood in his fiction never bore fruit — at least in his lifetime. My impression was that he was a real gentleman beneath the shabby exterior and that you would find plenty of stickers from hell on his suitcase, if it hadn’t been stolen at the luggage carousel.
My editors held the story I wrote, by the way, looking for some kind of hook. Then the magazine went out of business — a very Yatesian ending.