Fans of excellent gushy awards acceptance speeches - which I am, in a kind of I hate it I love it I can't watch yes I can oh god please stop, PLEASE STOP, please don't stop sort of way - can't do much better than watching this sterling effort from Kate Winslet last night:
(Did anybody see her when she got the Supporting Actress gong? More contained?)
Fans of excellent books - which I certainly am, in every way - can't do much better than reading Revolutionary Road. I'm on a bit of a mission about this because I'm in a sudden panic that not enough people will have read Revolutionary Road before they see the movie. If you have sat next to me at dinner or indeed anywhere this week, this is what I have been talking about. Advance apologies to future dinner neighbours.
The film, as you'll know if you watch that speech, reunites Ms Winslet and Leo DiCaprio from Titanic and then throws in her husband too for the ultimate in love-ins. Actually I'm sure the film will be good if a tad smug, and I'm looking forward to seeing it. But it will not be, can not be, as good as Revolutionary Road, the novel.
Revolutionary Road, the novel is SO GOOD. I can't do the dispassionate reviewer thing here because I am too anxious that you might not read it. It has to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, or indeed of any time. The book is about a married couple in 1950s suburban America who live on a knife edge between happiness and unhappiness. The smallest shifts in their lives and relationships keep tipping them from one side to the other. Or perhaps it is about a married couple in 1950s suburban America who are hanging over an abyss of unhappiness and all they have to cling onto is that knife edge, only it's cutting more and more deeply into their hands. Yes: I think that might be it.
They key thing is, vis a vis book v movie, is that the magic of the novel isn't so much in what happens, but in the exquisite, wise, meticulous observation of the shifts in the characters' internal lives, and how that shapes and is shaped by the decisions that they make. I'm certain that Leo and Kate will act it beautifully, but there really is no substitute from the level of detail that you can have in a novel - in this novel. So if you see the film you will enjoy it and you will think you have understood the characters, but it will be nothing in comparison to the depth of understanding you can get from the book.
Please read it before you see the film. Please, please. Run, don't walk, to your nearest independent bookshop. Or order it right now. Look, you can get it from play.com and help balance out Amazon's market share of online retailing, ensuring a more competitive marketplace. Whatever. Just get it and read it before you see the film. You will not regret it.
Come on down!
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18 comments:
Poor love, she has waited a long time for her thank yous hasn't she? How IS she going to top that if she gets an Oscar???
She's right you know. Go forth and buy it - it's ace.
I'm reading it at the moment- its amazing. The writing is beautiful. I have to read passages over and over again to marvel at the articulation of the emotions. Its amazing anyway- I agree. x
No, her supporting actress speech was just as long and only slightly less weepy. (Although, on the plus side, it didn't put her in the embarrassing position of making a love speech to Leonard DiCaprio before having to squeezing her husband in.) Furthermore, she had a list for the first one, although I don't think she quite got around to thanking the grips...
I've always found it better to read the book after the film. That way, I can enjoy both. If I've read the book first, I'm almost guaranteed to find the movie disappointing. I've read The Reader but that was about seven years ago, so I might be safe in going to see the movie.
I loved Emma Thompson in her supporting role at the Golden Globes, particularly when she asked Sally Hawkins if she needed help. (Really glad Happy-Go-Luck won something.)
Your blog just made someone buy a copy from us so thanks Marie...
Yay for whoever bought it from C&P!
May I politely suggest that Easter Parade by Richard Yates is even better?
Also, when everyone who acts upon your recommendation and ends up loving Yates, as they all surely will, they may well want to check out some Charles Baxter or the non Sci-Fi work of Philip K Dick - both excellent further reading for Yates fans.
Scott has stolen my thunder; although Revolutionary Road is very good, I also think that Easter Parade is better. NB EP is told from the point of view of a female narrator.
But, now I'm going to be controversial - I think that there is a problem with Yates in his characteristically bleak emotional key, which his admirers often refer to as an expression of some kind of "honesty". I don't object to the bleakness, which can often be revelatory, but I think it frequently verges on the sentimental, or perhaps the anti-sentimental, the cultivation of quiet desperation (or not so quiet, alcohol-fuelled, ranting desperation).
OK, I'll shut up now. Enjoy.
Dohhh - Easter Parade has a female central character, but a gender-less 3rd-person narrator. Apologies.
Interesting point Alun - I'm not a proponent of the 'bleak is more profound than happy' school of thought, to which many people subscribe - for a start, I'm a happy person and have no wish to cultivate a bleak worldview just so that people will take me seriously. But I don't mind reading bleak books - there is bleakness in the world after all, and it's no *less* profound than happy.
The bleakness wasn't a problem I had with Revolutionary Road, but maybe the oh-god-cheer-up-ometer kicks in once you have read a few of his. I have only read RR (though will be checking out EP.)
I'm going to do that. The Revolutionary Road script is up on SimplyScripts, by the way, and like all good scripts it is deceptively simple. It has made me look forward to the film very much, and Kate Winslet's acting chops never cease to amaze.
Just de-lurking to say I'm reading Revolutionary Road and am so enjoying it when I saw Easter Parade, I came home with that as well.
Am a little worried as usually if I love a book this much, I'll end up being very disappointed in the movie and I was looking forward to seeing it.
I just don't agree that EP is better than RR and have a sneaking suspicion that some people (not any of the commenters on this blog obviously) claim that it is only to sound better-read-than-thou. Having said that, EP is terrific too. By the way, if you haven't already y'all should check out James Wood on RR - it's a brilliant essay: http://tinyurl.com/58emas
Excellent link Ian, thank you. Those who haven't read Revolutionary Road yet should wait until they have to click on it, though - "contains spoilers" as they say.
Oooh, little sis, if you get EP, think of passing it on to me this summer!
Am planning to pick it up this afternoon...
I picked up on RR as its something of a core classic for those writing about mid-20th century (US) literature or about families/masculinities in that period -- as these were topics of interest amongst fellow PhD students in American Studies I hooked on it then. It is an incredibly well written book and a thoughtful narrative. Will be interesting to see how much of its qualities the film can capture...
Y'all might want to try "A Good School", a later Yates novel set in a mediocre prep school in Connecticut during WWII. I don't know if it's better than RR or EP, but it's certainly gentler. Yates was also a first-rate short-story writer. His "Jody Rolled the Bones" is an American classic, just like its author. Yates drank too much, smoked too much, wrote beautifully, and died in a veterans hospital in Birmingham, Alabama--not too far from where I'm writing this--in 1992.
Yates is indeed bleak, but there are glimpses of hope and kindness in his later works. The last few pages of "The Easter Parade", for example, or the revival of the Drapers' marriage at the end of "A Good School".
Speaking of movies: Yates wrote a screenplay of William Styron's "Lie Down in Darkness" in the early 1960s. It was never filmed. Perhaps now it will be.
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