"Revolutionary Road" Needs Resurfacing

Ah, Sam Mendes. The man who believes emptiness and profundity are one and the same.

Solomon had the misfortune to watch the second of Mendes’s snide and snooty slapdowns of American exceptionalism the other night, a snoozefest called “Revolutionary Road.” His other piece of sophomoric crap that I am familiar with is “American Beauty,” a work that was given the Best Picture award by the Oscars, and has since proved how totally embarrassing anti-Americanism can be.

This man has absolutely NO understanding of American culture! He’s not one of us, but he feels he has the duty to comment on us because, oh, I don’t know, he’s read "Catcher in the Rye" or some such drivel. He sees all of us Americans as adult Holden Caulfields—yearning (not to be free--simply yearning, because there's nothing else to do) stifled artists, put down and kept down by America’s capitalist system.

We lead pointless lives, have joyless sex, indulge in even more joyless affairs, speak only of mindless things, never laugh other than cynically and bitterly, plod aimlessly toward death—but, oh yes, have an occasional but ever-so-brief moment of enlightenment that shows a glimmer of hope of breaking this cycle. This moment of clarity, of course, is subsumed by the suffocating thing we know as conformity. Mendes knows it as "America."

Great writers such as Sinclair Lewis long ago dealt with this concept of people running into a midlife crisis, reaching for an escape, and then in a bittersweet moment returning to what they escaped from. Works such as "Main Street," "Babbitt," and "Arrowsmith" resound with humor, truth, and wisdom. Above all, though they make fun of many Americans and American institutions, they do not blame or belittle America. The nation is larger than life itself and is the backdrop for stories of individuals. Mendes and his films, however, are bores who put cardboard characters in crisis so that America, not the characters, can be blamed and belittled. There is no, and I mean zero, nada humor in "Revolutionary Road," so you know you are being hit with a heavy hand. It's as enjoyable and light as a Puritan damnation sermon.

Mendes's wife, the vacant smokefest Kate Winslet, is showcased here doing her imitation of Sylvia Plath, the boring neurotic “writer” of the fifties who eventually does herself in by sticking her head in an oven. In "Revolutionary Road," she does herself in by sticking a rubber-hose-thingamajiggy up her twat to induce an abortion that doesn't seem to sit too well. Free of her unwanted unborn child, she gets less than one minute's joy before she begins dripping blood on the living room carpet--and then she dies. (It's as if Mendes is saying, "Damn you, America, if only we had Roe vs. Wade back then, this woman could have reached her potential, but no, she had to resort to 'back alley' methods and see where it ended." Solomon believes that abortion should be allowed only if it guarantees to end a stupid movie and a stupid character early.) Kate’s character here is simply a moronic female who hasn’t the ability to appreciate or to love—yet we are supposed to empathize with her. Puhleeze!

My friend Paco Ramirez has a theory about women: All women are crazy, so if they’re noticeably crazy, at least you know what you’re dealing with. If they don’t appear crazy, you should be well advised to remember that they are and that their insanity is only lying doggo and will manifest itself in even more insidious and more terrifying ways. So, better to get a woman whose craziness is up front. It makes dealing with them easier. I bring this up because Winslet’s character is a perfect example of this. She seems normal, but she is deep-down nuts—with no reason except that she is a woman. And any man understands this. But not Sam Mendes. Mendes naively assumes that the character’s craziness is because of big bad America. This is his great mistake—he blames America when he should have had the maturity and honesty to recognize that the woman is the victim of her own inherent craziness.

I do not find Kate Winslet to be a beautiful woman nor a fascinating actress. She seems to have turned her unplucked, monumental eyebrows toward making “sullen” her trademark acting style. Now, men who are sullen have about them an air of sexy mystery; women who are sullen, on the other hand, have about them an air of stupidity and cuntiness. Kate also seems to have become the mistress of another repetitive action besides taking off her clothes and spreading her legs and simulating orgasm—more than these, she spends her every acting assignment dying. She has become the Absolute Queen of Death in movies—if Winslet’s in the movie, you can lay unbeatable odds that she will expire before the final credits roll. (I also guarantee that you won't shed a single tear when she does!)

That Mendes seems to fancy himself the expert on American Culture is arrogant and ignorant and insulting. He’s not an American, didn’t grow up in the culture he holds up to the lens, and doesn’t have a scintilla of knowledge about it except what he learned from reading such run-down works as those written by Eastern seaboard malcontents and sociopaths such as Salinger. And possibly hobnobbing with despicable liberal members of the New York and Hollywood entertainment world.

A person who was not raised in a culture cannot, despite all his intense desire to do so, truly understand that culture. Period. True knowledge of a culture is the sole province of a born-and-bred insider. Mendes is practicing jejune imposture—his are the actions and reactions of a wannabe who thinks that only an insider could know so much about a culture that he is able to show how truly horribly flawed it is.

Unfortunately, the flaw with Mendes is that his films show how utterly he MISunderstands America and its unique culture. And I personally resent some outsider pretending to understand me and my life by showing how empty and invalid it all is. I think that I, and all Americans (boobs though we may be), are able to judge our existence without the assist of outsiders like Mendes and his wife Winslet, thank you very much.

Mendes has his characters yearn to chuck a fairly lucrative but despicably American life (that is, of course, nothing but quiet desperation—honestly, you’d think they were starving physically the way they carry on) to go to Paris, for God’s sake! It’s the only place where people are really alive, don’t you know. New York City and environs contain no shreds of honesty and fulfillment.

Whew! For a minute there, I thought this movie was supposed to be about adults. But I forgot that it is a Mendes movie, and these are cartoons that make Speed Racer look like Shakespeare by comparison. Nobody has extended families. Every family and every member in that family is a separate, suffering island. And as if this point hasn’t been made perfectly clear to the audience, Mendes brings in a mentally deranged mathematician, son of Kathy Bates, to provide hard, bring-em-to-Jesus scrutiny of their meaningless lives and their fear of facing this fact.

When this element was introduced into the movie, I knew that this “message” was going to be beyond redemption, and I was right. Nothing rings true after this, especially not the joyless sexual couplings that are obligatory in a Mendes movie. Mendes, like Monty Python’s pedantic teacher of sex, makes sex actually uninteresting. If sex were as Mendes portrays in his films, the human race would have ceased to exist right after the Garden of Eden experience.

It has been fair game to knock America and its culture for a long time, and American literature includes satires, analyses, and critiques of this people and place-more-than-a-place that rank as first-rate entertainments and thought pieces. But all these things were produced by insiders, not some outsider who wears a pseudo mantle of sophistication embroidered with the words “You’re too stupid to see how awful you really are” writ large.

Ah Europe. You’ll never understand us. And a word of advice: Don’t write (or make movies) about those things you don’t understand. You end up looking like a fool—and being hated to boot.