Last night we sat down to watch Revolutionary road. It’s a film set in 1950’s America’s , where a young couple Frank and April Wheeler( played magnificently by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) with full of high hopes and expectations for their lives slowly, let eventually come undone, with ultimately devastating consequences.
Frank and April dreamed of being something and being “somebodies”. They felt and wanted to be different from everyone else. Yet as time went by, and life happened to them, they learned that they were, like everyone else, simply human and ordinary. Frank might have been a dreamer once, but in the end he really was a corporate man like his father, and he didn’t want another adventure. April, who once planned to be an actress, but didn’t succeed, wrestled with the bubbling passion for more in her life, juxtaposed with the grinding sense of ambivalence and failure as mother. And the world she lived in seemed to suffocate her and deny her the world she longed for. The revelation broke them into a million pieces. Arguments ended up in relational cul de sacs, responsibilities bred resentment, and disappointments led to desperate selfish acts of infidelity, as if they were narcotics to numb the pain of seemingly futile lives. April ultimate desperate act was to attempt to abort the unborn child that seemed to stand in the way of her dreams and their shared future, and the attempt cost her her life.
To me it was more than a great film, with some of my favorite actors. Even though it was set in a different era, there was something timeless about it’s explorations of life and relationships which I found made it staggeringly relevant in today’s culture. It wasn’t just the revelation that not everyone’s dreams are fulfilled. Even in this age of American Idol, and lottery tickets to a new life, somewhere in us we still know that we can’t always get to do what we want. What got me in this film was this couple had to reckon with the fact that they weren’t who they thought they were or who they hoped each other would be, and they couldn’t find a way to deal with the textured, complexity of ordinary life. And extraordinary dream is one thing; you can shape and control your hopes and expectations, your relationships and responsibilities.
But ordinary life? Who has the emotional capacity, the mental rigor the physical energy for that? Who knows how to handle life? If we did we probably wouldn’t have half the Supernanny, What not to wear, how clean is your house type shows that disciple us on how to live, would we? Perhaps we are rudderless, visionless, after all – we didn’t learn this kind of stuff in school or college. That was about what you were going to be when you grew up. Now we’re here we have to work out how to be grown up whatever our landscape looks like. We all need signposts to that road
There’s much more to say a
nd to think on this. In another post, I guess.
I also loved this film, and found it very moving. I still haven’t fully worked out why. But what I realized is that even though it was set 50 years ago the problems, frustrations, hopes and dreams are still the same today.
As you say Jo, the world, even our schools, ask us ‘what do you want to be’ and tell us ‘you can do anything you set your mind on’, and yet that’s not entirely true. Because ‘living for the dream’ often causes people to lead lives that aren’t grounded in reality.
The thing I have been thinking about recently is living at God’s pace, waiting when he says wait, and moving when he says move.
It is good to have a vision for our lives, and even better to partner with God in making it happen.