Road to nowhere

April thought she and Frank must be extraordinary, that they would surely lead extraordinary lives, but then April got pregnant, Frank took an office job, and they bought themselves a house deep in the suburbs, where a second child emerged as alarmingly as the first. Before you know it, it’s 1955, and Frank’s 30. He’s having a liquid lunch, commiserating with some seducable innocent from the secretarial pool over how he found himself embedded in such mediocrity. He comes home on his birthday, and April, as though under some intoxicating spell, tells him they’re going to sell the house and car. They’re going to go to Paris, that place that so dazzled Frank when he passed through during the war. There’s still time for them to be extraordinary.

But of course, there isn’t. Happiness and fulfillment are less than fleeting in Revolutionary Road. They’re abstractions, something we never catch glimpse of, even in traces. The first three minutes of the movie sweep us from April and Frank’s first encounter to bracingly resentful, belligerent arguments on the side of the freeway. We start in neatly designed domestic despair and pretty much stay there, which is to say that director Sam Mendes’ latest film, an adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 eponymous novel, stuck with theatrical, histrionic, dated sounding talk—the script’s by Justin Haythe—makes a companion to Mendes’ breakthrough, American Beauty, which was also rife with neatly designed domestic despair, yet offered flashes of revelation. Even in the crucial scene in which April and Frank resolve to start anew in Europe, there isn’t a single flashing moment of revelation here, no dreamy thrill or sense of connection between them. Nor is there any such moment when they inevitably decide not to go, no relief or resignation, no mourning for opportunities lost or delayed. These scenes, rendered at times in handsome close-ups that do little to help the dearth of chemistry, just die up there on the screen, as the movie slowly sucks the life out of us all.

What is genuinely extraordinary in Revolutionary Road is Kate Winslet’s performance, newly crowned with a Golden Globe. Her April wanted to be an actor, and there she is, acting up a storm every day of her drab life, folding napkins, making supper, cleaning the drapes, playing the role of dutiful wife. Winslet keeps a current of electricity flowing through her better scenes. She’s almost scary, sad, yet sexy, in the one where she’s abandoned at a roadhouse with a fawning neighbour. She gets drunk, and, overwhelmed with angst, looks up at him and suddenly, with a comically grave expression, says, “Come on, let’s do it.” When she's later pinned by this neighbour in the front seat of a car, the way she holds her body rigid is itself interesting and unnerving to watch. April has sex twice in this film, each time lasting all of 30 seconds, and the disappointment registers on Winslet's face in an odd way that keeps you watching and wondering about what exactly is building up inside of her, rather than having her inner landscape all splayed out to mourn over. Before we reach the hysterical climax, Winslet's is a harrowing presence.

Fine actor though he is, Leonardo DiCaprio by contrast gives one of his most fraught performances. His Frank is basically an average guy in way over his head. He's no match for April in more ways than one. There’s a brilliantly gauged scene where Frank meets with a potential new employer for lunch, and DiCaprio’s pent-up frustration, that tension held in his jaw and forehead, makes it all too clear how Frank, for all his talk about his lousy job, realizes that he might be really good at it. And that he kinda likes that. And that maybe that's right where he belongs. Just about everywhere else in Revolutionary Road however, DiCaprio squints, gesticulates and shouts to excess, unable to spend a single moment on screen with a neutral expression. A moment of repose could tell us so much here, letting us catch the character off guard instead of bracing vaguely for a new attack. So DiCaprio flails in uncertainty, yet I can’t completely hold it against him. The material, which indeed devastates, presses too tightly up against the actors, positively stifling them. And Mendes’ approach seems so decided from the start, so obviously superior to the milieu depicted. So in the end I suppose DiCaprio’s rather like Frank: he simply never had a chance.

Just because you're paranoid: revisiting three terrorific tales by Guy de Maupassant

I’d happened upon a dog-eared copy of his collected stories while staying alone for a few days in this sort of cottage belonging to the father of a friend, a little place in the Rockies. This was years ago and I recall knowing next to nothing about Guy de Maupassant, really, though some sliver of a memory told me ‘Le Horla’ was supposed to be something special. I cooked up some coffee, rubbed my knees to get warm, nestled by a foggy widow in the kitchen, figuring I’d kill a little time with some light reading. I didn’t figure on being unshakably creeped out. Or on the story being so deliciously wrought.

It seems Maupassant’s not read so much these days, at least in English. I don’t know his novels, but his stories are marvelous. I’ve been reacquainting myself with several of them, partially because I've been realizing just how many great filmmakers have adapted Maupassant—Buñuel, Ophüls, Godard—but mostly because autumn is the time of year I habitually set aside for reading anything that might raise the little back-of-the-neck hairs, which often winds up being something from the 1900s, that century haunted by the clash of scientific discovery and persistent folklore, by anxieties drawn from exploration, colonialism and industrialization. Several of Maupassant’s best stories are sly examinations of class insecurity, some, like the marvelous ‘Tellier House’ or ‘Mademoiselle Fifi,’ focus specifically on the fortunes of wily prostitutes. Relatively few could be considered horror in the strictest sense, and those that come closest are relentlessly ambiguous with regards to the supernatural—yet the very particular breed of unease in which they trade functions as a sort of bridge between Poe and Paul Bowles, while exhibiting a flair for economy that looks forward to Hemingway.

‘The Hand’ is a terrific example of Maupassant’s deft managing of the short, sharp macabre, one of those tales relayed by a party with only limited knowledge of what truly passed. A magistrate promises a small audience of women—it seems always the women who are openly curious about all things ghastly or inexplicable in these stories—his memory of “a case that truly seemed to verge on fantasy,” involving an Englishman residing in a Corsican town, a place teeming with legends of violent vendettas. The Englishman possesses an impressive collection of trophies from his travels to exotic lands, among them a human hand, shackled at the wrist, which belonged to an American, the Englishman’s “worst enemy.” Things get especially interesting when the Englishman is mysteriously murdered, and I love the way Maupassant has his otherwise very orderly narrator stop in the midst of describing a crime scene to conspicuously note that the culprit was never found. A finger, however, eventually is. I won’t tell you where.

‘The Inn’ was supposedly a big influence on Stephen King’s The Shinning, though its narrative simplicity and formal elegance could have just as easily informed countless subsequent stories of cabin fever. It concerns a pair of guides looking after an inn nestled in “those bare and rocky gorges that cut through white mountain peaks,” a place that serves as refuge for travelers going through the Gemini Pass. As the story begins the guides are escorting their summer guests down the mountain on the eve of winter, when the inn becomes a “snowy prison” and the area impassable. Ulrich, the younger of the guides, is heartsick for one of the daughters of the departing family, and Maupassant, in spare language, vividly evokes the ache felt as the desired girl carries on past the point where the guides must turn back, disappearing into the distant valley that will soon be erased under a blanket of white.

But the pain of the girl’s absence felt by Ulrich will eventually be replaced by his panic over the absence of Gaspard, his elder co-worker and sole companion for the six-month long off-season, aside from their dog. With Gaspard’s disappearance, paranoia replaces longing, rising like a presence within the “death-like hush of the sleeping mountains.” Maupassant traces Ulrich’s growing worries in prose that keeps within the constraints of reportage, always cool and detached, the antithesis of the histrionics that can makes the work of H.P. Lovecraft, for one, hard to take at times.

Oddly enough, Lovecraft cited ‘Le Horla’ as a source of inspiration for his own ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ though whatever tonal resemblance they share might be explained by the fact that ‘Horla’ is written in the first-person as a journal, allowing Maupassant to indulge in flights of subjective inner turmoil on behalf of his lonesome, deeply troubled protagonist, who, regardless of how we interpret his claims of being pursued by some invisible entity, is clearly losing his marbles. Maupassant’s prose is by nature not overtly poetic, yet there’s much poetry in his looping of images which shift in meaning upon return, as is the case with the ship from Brazil sailing down the Seine. When first it appears our protagonist is so inexplicably moved by its grace that he salutes it. By the time it returns, this ship will become a harbinger of catastrophic malaise.

The journal keeper is tormented by a heightened awareness of the invisible influences at work in the world, phenomena that seems to him sufficiently grounded in both science and common sense. His sleep is gradually invaded by the sensation of some succubus-like presence, what would today be likely diagnosed as the effects of parasomnia. He sees containers of water and milk mysteriously drained every night. At one point he witnesses the power of hypnosis on a relative and is overcome with terror of the psyche’s frailty, all the more reason to feel susceptible to the elusive force he characterizes as spying, watching, penetrating and dominating. He’s spiraling into some sort of psychologically induced abyss, clearly, yet this doesn’t mean that the entity won’t succeed in corrupting and finally ruining him.

“Solitude is certainly dangerous for active intellects,” the protagonist of ‘Le Horla’ tells us, which may remind us of the inherent solitude of the writer. At one point the protagonist complains about having never read anything that might describe his condition—but how did Maupassant feel toward the end of his life, shortened by syphilis and its accompanying madness, knowing that not only had he read about such conditions but actually wrote about them? Some say he was already going mad when he wrote ‘Le Horla.’ He died, a year after attempting suicide, on June 6, 1893. He was 42.