Curious to find out just how much of its banality "Revolutionary Road" owed to the book that inspired it, I picked up Richard Yates' 1961 novel of the same name.
It turns out that Hollywood's shallow portrayal of the Wheelers can be attributed to its faithfulness to the original story. "Revolutionary Road" is a novel about two young lovers struggling to play the ill-cast parts of man and wife.
The novel opens with the disastrous debut of an amateur theatre company production starring April Wheeler, a bright woman who attended acting school before marrying Frank and moving to the suburbs. Frank is unable to lie and tell April she's done a good job in the performance; he can't even find the right words to comfort her.
This communication barrier between the Wheelers remains unbroken throughout the novel, as Yates takes us back through the history that led the Wheelers to this moment -- their bohemian affair when April was an actress and Frank a drifting war veteran, and their settling down as newlyweds in a community whose homogenizing forces they pledged to resist -- and then onward through the summer when they make one last attempt to free themselves by moving away.
Through it all, dialogue between the Wheelers is forced and melodramatic. They exhaust themselves in the struggle to play their respective parts, all the while secretly resenting the confinement of their roles as husband and wife. As a result, their emotions explode in speeches loaded with self-pity and pathos.
Because Justin Haythe's screenplay for "Revolutionary Road" is so remarkably loyal to Yates's book, reading the novel after having seen the movie, I could imagine the actors' mouths moving over every line.
Yet while Yates can guide us through the Wheelers' heavy arguments by delving into their minds, Kate and Leo cannot provide the same dimension to rescue the scenes from heavy-handedness and melodrama.
The actors, like Haythe's script, are too faithful to Yates -- they play bad actors so well that we forget they are acting.
