January 24, 2012 at 12:15 P.M. I received several interesting phone calls recently: January 23, 2012 at 10:42 A.M. from (201) 267-3646 (something about my credit cards?) and January 21, 2012 at 11:35 A.M. from 661-670-2619 from "Donor Services." What happened to "MARITZ Research"? Senator Bob, are these your people? "Errors" inserted -- sometimes, reinserted -- in this essay since my previous review will now be corrected.
December 11, 2009 at 10:41 A.M. A newly-inserted "error" was corrected. More sabotage must be expected in response to my revisions of "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absole Me.'" I will struggle to continue to write.
March 2, 2009 at 11:17 A.M. Censorship efforts directed against all of my writings and obstructions preventing me from accessing MSN Groups, if that site still exists, make writing difficult today. I am always searching for new locations where I can make use of images. No images can be posted with this review at blogger. I will try a public computer.
Revolutionary Road has received 4 Oscar nominations and 4 Golden Globe nominations -- including best director, I believe.
December 29, 2008 at 10:22 A.M. a word was deleted from this essay-review overnight. Attacks on this article will be constant. I cannot say how many other essays have been vandalized at this point.
January 6, 2009 at 2:00 P.M. New "errors" have been inserted in this text. I have corrected them once again.
Revolutionary Road (Paramount-Vantage, 2008), Sam Mendes (Director), based on the novel by Richard Yates, Roger Deakins (Outstanding director of photography), edited by Tariq Anwar, "starring" Leonardo DiCaprio (Frank Wheeler), Kate Winslet (April Wheeler), Kathy Bates (Mrs. Givings).
Manohla Dargis, "Two Faces in the Crowd: Raging Against the Crab Grass," in The New York Times, December 26, 2008, at p. C1.
"Revolutionary Road," (Brief Review) The New Yorker, January 19, 2009, at p. 16. (David Denby.)
Nick DiChario, "'Revolutionary Road': Is it Existential, or Just Depressing?," in Philosophy Now, September/October, 2009, at p. 44. (Mr. DiChario gets the existential and misses the social-postmodernist motifs in this work, thus earning a "B+" for his efforts. Don't be afraid to be smart. This is the best of the three reviews listed.)
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (New York: Picador, 2003).
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (New York: Methuen, 1961).
Richard Yates, Collected Stories (New York & London: Picador, 2001), the introduction by Richard Russo is highly recommended. My favorite story is "Liars in Love." Richard Yates is one of the great masters of short story technique.
"The shits are killing us." (Norman Mailer)
I am rarely disappointed by a reviewer for The New York Times on a consistent basis. It must be said, however, that Manohla Dargis takes the art of the inconclusive and pointless "review" to a new level. It is shocking that a person -- who is clearly an intelligent and semi-decent writer -- can also be so lacking in affective capacity or insight, as well as literary or cinematic-cultural knowledge, thus blundering into obvious interpretive "errors." Animosity may account for this blindness, but it does not explain stupidity or ignorance. You must know better than this, Ms. Dargis. ("Manohla Dargis Strikes Again!")
Among the worst writers and commentators at the Times, besides Ms. Dargis, I include Jim Holt and Susan Jacoby. A.O. Scott? These are the people who give mediocrity a bad name. Should any journalist be a party to censorship? I always have the feeling with Mr. Holt and Ms. Jacoby that editorial insertions in their writings from a much lesser hand does great damage to their works.
I will review Revolutionary Road and provide a response to the Times. After reading the Times critique, one is left without the slightest idea of the stylistic ingredients or texture of the movie, tempo, mood, characteristics of the performances and script quality. No reader should rely on Ms. Dargis' assessments of Richard Yates, the outstanding novelist whose book inspired this film. The so-called "reviewer" fails to detect themes that made this literary work timely to the director who -- far from being a "dabbler" in films -- is one of the few great film directors in the world, winning numerous awards, including an Oscar (if I remember correctly).
Ms. Dargis sniffs the air and comments: "... Mr. Mendes, a British theater director and occasional dabbler in the movies [emphasis added] ..." Mr. Mendes directed all of the following: American Beauty, Road to Perdition (Paul Newman alone is worth the cost of that DVD), Jarhead. Academy award nominations resulting in Oscars have accompanied several of his efforts. Incidentally, Mr. Mendes has been able to present several of the very best Shakespeare productions in New York city, including a universally hailed King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) that featured Sir Derek Jacoby. That's what I call "dabbling."
Mr. Mendes is a "painter in celluloid," a phrase used to describe Frederico Fellini. Sam Mendes is also a composer in the sense that he creates a blending of music and visual imagery that is unique among directors today. The soundtrack of this movie is great. Mr. Mendes was married to Kate Winslet. Clearly, Mr. Mendes is a favorite of the gods. To deploy a throw-away insult and trivializing dismissal, describing Mr. Mendes as a "dabbler," is unusually mean-spirited and pointless. Is this reviewer truly disinterested and objective? Why the obvious dislike for this affable Brit? What sort of canvas is Revolutionary Road?
If you, Ms. Dargis, have a problem with someone other than Sam Mendes, then do not aim your barbs at Mr. Mendes or his films. I am sure that your true target will be able to take care of himself. A moronic review in the Times can hurt a good movie, director or actor, professionally and personally. Dislike of a film is appropriate, when genuinely felt, but to transform artists into "collateral damage" in order to insult an adversary, indirectly, is unforgivable. I prefer direct insults. It now seems probable (although I remain skeptical) that, in a sad moment of dementia, Mr. Mendes separated from Kate Winslet. This has no bearing on his work as a director of movies which is what concerns me.
To suggest that the novel was "fine in its day," but not really "relevant" or perceptive today is absurd. A great work of art is timeless. The exploration of themes central to the human condition such as happiness and identity, America's endangered "soul" and concern with meanings are hardly "dated" -- especially today. Naturally, these issues are not seen by the reviewer as being central to this narrative, both in literary and cinematic versions of the story. The most important movies forming a background to this film are Ordinary People by Robert Redford and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a Gregory Peck vehicle based on a novel anticipating David Reisman's findings in The Lonely Crowd. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
This movie and book are (obviously) about America. The real question posed by this director, I suspect, is: "What do Americans really want today?" How we answer this question will say a great deal about our national identity in the first decades of the twenty-first century. I believe that Americans often do not know what they want. I know what I want. How about you?
I am aware that we are in the midst of an economic crisis. I know people are hurting. I am among the people who are hurting. It is a myth that rich people are all blissfully happy or even that they should be happy. There are many forms of suffering and spiritual crises affecting rich as well as poor nations and persons in our world. Shakespeare understood this point, see Henry IV (Falstaff's exchanges with Prince Hal), then Henry V (battlefield meditations on the duties of office). Perhaps Shakespeare, for Ms. Dargis, was a mere "dabbler" in theater. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Why ask an aesthetic MORON (Ms. Dargis) to review a movie like this? Somebody at America's self-styled "newspaper of record" must have a great sense of humor. All human lives contain tragedy and hope, longing and fulfillment, achievement and failure. Every human being will need to experience and come to terms with freedom, love, and death. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Are freedom, love, death and the meaning of life still "relevant," Ms. Dargis? I think so. Here is what The New Yorker had to say:
"It turns out that there is a gap between the Wheelers soaring spiritual ambitions and their actual talents and interests."
This gap is actually the human condition and not "delusions of grandeur." The essential incapacity of desire to be satiated in Freudian or Schopenhauer-like terms, whether by means of material or erotic satisfactions, is a theme in much great literature. This fits the classic definition of tragedy. No, dissatisfaction is not my problem; anger at injustice is my concern. Furthermore, Mr. Denby complains: " ... DiCaprio is a little afraid of revealing the depth of Frank's shallowness."
This absurd. There is no "deep shallowness" to show, since this is an incoherent term. You cannot be "deeply shallow" nor can you "climb a mountain while falling off a cliff." "Deep" and "shallow" are, usually, mutually exclusive terms. This is my favorite of Mr. Denby's astute observations: "Watching the two go at each other may be cathartic for some, but it shouldn't be confused with movie art."
Well, Aristotle argued that catharsis was the essence of aesthetic experience, especially tragedy. However, Aristotle may have been a mere "dabbler" in aesthetic theory, as Manohla Dargis would say. For Aristotle, if Mr. Denby is right about catharsis, this movie is the essence of art. This would make Mr. Denby's own conclusion false. I wonder whether David Denby knows Manohla Dargis? Perhaps they go to the movies together because their styles are so similar. Incidentally, I read your book Mr. Denby and you do know better than this.
In describing the America captured in Revolutionary Road, Norman Mailer said: " ... I have been dying a little these fifteen years, and so have a good many of you, no doubt -- none of us are doing quite so much as we once thought we would. But then, this has been a bad time, we've all been flattened by the dead air of this time, dinched and tamped into a flat-footed class. ..."
" ... a remark like 'the shits are killing us' is so declarative that fifty pages of closely reasoned argument should follow."
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 18-19 (1st Pub. 1959).
"There is a wound and who shall staunch it up?" (W.H. Auden)
"April Wheeler" is a beautiful young woman possessed by emotional ambition and intellectual appetite as well as feeling for dramatic art, if not great talent. We are immediately aware of T.S. Eliot's verse "April is the cruelest month."
This line from Eliot's masterpiece "The Wasteland" clues us in to the mythological-narrative that we are invited to enter: Tragedy is only the form of this work, not necessarily its meaning. We are placed in a tradition that stretches back to Euripides ("Medea" is an offstage presence) to Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens." Revolutionary Road is a pathway to a wasteland of despair, a descent into a Dantesque inferno.
"Frank Wheeler" is anything but "frank" or honest. However, he is a "wealer/dealer," a phrase much used in the sixties and common in the all-male world of business at the dawn of Camelot in America. Suburbia is a desert of spiritual death-in-life. Honesty is a prime value. Holden's war against the "phony" world in Catcher in the Rye is one touchstone for Mr. Yates. Against the middlebrows who hate the dark vision of this book and author -- also this new movie -- there was praise from William Styron, John Updike, Tennessee Williams and Martin Levin:
"The excellence of the book" -- and film -- "[are] its integrity ... Eschewing the pitfalls of obvious caricature or patent moralizing, Mr. Yates [also Sam Mendes] chooses the more difficult path of allowing his characters to reveal themselves -- which they do with an intensity that excites the reader's compassion as well as his interest."
A Tragic Honesty, pp. 227-228.
This is a story of two lives, also of what happened to America in the aftermath of World War, II thanks to the comformism and willful anesthesia of the Eisenhower years -- a crushing of the spirit and suffocation of the artist's soul in the straightjacket of "normality." This is a story about America's life.
The words "insane" and "normal" surface with regularity in a wonderful script inviting viewers to see that this film is also about them, us, now. I look forward to any Sam Mendes movie. The visual feast alone makes the experience worthwhile. Aside from "Revolutionary Road," you will be dazzled by "American Beauty."
The definition of insanity that we are offered is deliberately misleading. Madness is something that does indeed fit the script's definition (roughly, "lack of adjustment and inability to feel appropriately"), but insanity is a forensic term associated with questions of responsibility in criminal law, that are not irrelevant to what transpires in this movie.
Insanity is concerned with the subject's capacity to recognize and distinguish right from wrong, as well as being able to control "impulses" towards "wrongful" or wicked behavior. Insanity is neither a scientific nor a medical concept. Insanity is a legal concept. Insanity is a kind of legal fiction that allows for excusing what would otherwise be a criminal act. Lincoln Caplan, The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John Hinckley, Jr. (Boston: David R. Godine, 1984), pp. 63-93.
Fiction is important to the themes developed in this film with awe-inspiring elegance in a kind of adagio movement from early encounter between extraordinarily good-looking protagonists to dark resolution in a kind of self-murder. The look of the film is worth the price of admission, as I say, because of Mr. Mendes' meticulous attention to period detail. Compositional choices and relations between geometric patterns illustrate themes of conformity against individuality, authenticity and its costs. I am in the midst of reading John Updike's feminist novel, S. This splendid book may well be regarded as the autobiography of April Wheeler.
How distant from Kate Winslet is April Wheeler and her world? Very distant, I think. Perhaps this explains Ms. Winslet's compassion for her creation on celluloid. Winslet's portrait is tinged with compassion, yes, but also regret. The office set is all straight lines, pastel shades dominate color-coordinated lives, where the existence of "the color purple" is only whispered. This is America's comfortable white middle class before African-Americans ("negroes") arrived to revive our sense of a national self-image. These straight lines are juxtaposed against bad paintings borrowing from America's abstract expressionists' longings for existential freedom. Pastel shades (comformity) against primal colors (authenticity).
Frank and April marry, produce the requisite number of children, purchase the house in the suburbs ("it's really nice there" describes every such town), two-car garage, dull, safe, "tasteful" and uninspired decor, then they begin to live lives of quiet desperation.
Mr. Yates is a genius of spare, elegant and unforgettable prose whose passions drift through his writings. He slashes at American hypocrisy and contradictions. Mr. Mendes is a cool observer of calamity with a scientist's precision about describing, visually and verbally, all that he sees.
Vietnam hovered on the horizon then, just as Iraq floats at the edge of awareness for comfortable Americans today. The civil rights struggle was a non-issue for a woman who did not see herself as oppressed and who was, almost literally, murdered by a society that saw her aspirations as irrelevant and absurd. I do not believe that April was responsible for her final actions. However, I am certain that society -- all of us -- are responsible for April Wheeler's death.
Many April Wheelers died before Roe v. Wade, in 1973, allowed women "procreative options." There is such a thing as temporary insanity as a response to insane conditions, battle fatigue is one example. These people -- Frank and April -- waged a war that claimed all participants as casualties. Most wars accomplish exactly this result. Among the "arguments" put forward in this movie is women's need for procreative rights. ("Master and Commander.")
The "real world" never intrudes on these people's lives, lives unfolding within bubbles of social unreality that are astonishingly described as "being realistic" and "practical." You are a "man and can do anything," April says. I would die in such a setting. Mr. Yates almost did, struggling through a painful middle class existence, despite his genius. This presumption is unforgivable for persons like Mrs. Giving, who will seek to destroy any and all reminders of the falsity of their constructed social disguises in plastic relationships and lives.
Maybe this visceral hatred of authenticity and intelligence explains my struggles against censorship. I am unable to back-up files today. Attacks on my writings continue to take place, publicly. Hackers are afraid of my use of images. Can't take the truth, boys and girls? No wonder they keep blocking my computer's cable signal.
Mrs. Givings will not forgive the removal of her hypocritical lies and false moralizing. Persons who embody and define -- in their own minds -- something called "normal niceness" cannot stand to be shown their greed, cruelty, and joy in the pain of others. ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")
Hypocrites always detest authenticity. Terry Tuchin? "This is for your own good." Mrs. Givings cannot become aware of her falsehood and hypocrisy because these things are defenses against the real world which she will never enter. In exchange for genuine human commitment and relationships, Mrs. Givings has substituted "appearances" and a show of "niceness." ("More Trouble for Ridgewood, New Jersey" and "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")
Friedrich Nietzsche's work is devoted to introducing the nineteenth century version of Mrs. Givings to herself. Sigmund Freud has painted her portrait. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may best reflect the "family values" of Mrs. Givings. I am afraid that we may expect more attacks on this essay at any time.
All persons like Mrs. Givings -- and you've met people like her many times -- will spend their lives in a desperate effort to be "realistic" in order not to see the oh-so false "reality" of their fictional "normal" lives. Always try to be better than "normal." Another word for "average" is "death." What is unique about being you is being you. One message of this serious film is "live your life for you and not in terms of what your neighbors will say." Get it, Marilyn?
December 11, 2009 at 10:30 A.M. "Errors" have just been inserted in this essay. I have now corrected them, again. I realize that this process is painful for readers, but it is important that you witness this encounter between those who would silence and suppress creative expressions in the effort to dominate as well as control envied others, as against those who wish to think and create their work, even in opposition to power, as an offering of themselves for others.
Frank lacked the courage of April's romantic temperament. He was too worried about being judged, being different, or just unconcerned about Being. Yates was unable to sugar coat reality. Hence, he never "sold" as well as his books deserved. For this reason, Yates' books were "allowed to slip out of print. And it's also probably the reason some critics have wistfully regretted the fact that these stories hold out so little hope, even accusing Yates of reveling in the failures his characters must endure. ... the need to make romance out of ugly reality is a basic human craving, as is the accompanying need to hide what we are doing from ourselves."
Richard Russo, "Introduction," in Collected Stories, pp. XVIII-XIX.
Perhaps Yates -- and certainly, April Wheeler -- would insist that myth-making is inevitable and that death is preferable to living the fictional narratives of others -- shrinks, politicians, advertisers, big business or conventional "normality" rather than creating one's own literary identity as well as truth. See Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004), if it is still available and undamaged. This book-length essay by an unjustly obscure writer in New York may be a work of genius. The foregoing sentence is not meant literally. It is an example of something called "irony" or "delusions of grandeur."
The Kathy Bates character -- the same aptly-named "Mrs. Givings" (Terry Tuchin? Deborah T. Poritz? Stuart Rabner?) -- is a woman who may never exist in the world shared by the rest of us, even as her husband has obviously entered a living grave years before we meet him. In lots of ways, Mrs. Givings is the most fascinating character in this movie. Her son's madness is a highly sane response to the asylum-like torture chamber in which he is placed by his ostensibly "loving" mother. (R.D. Laing on the dynamics of families.)
This character, Mrs. Givings, is akin to the woman played by Ms. Bates in Mysery. Like the writer tortured by the Bates character in the Steven King-inspired classic, Mrs. Giving's family members suffer torments inflicted as "acts of kindness and concern" in Revolutionary Road. The irony and sadness arises from the realization that Mrs. Givings may be utterly sincere. Think of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited. ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
These fictional "people" (they are real to me) in the movie are in a bad play written by Madison Avenue's advertising industry and the Pentagon. All of them are more fascinating than the actors who play them. Eventually, they may discover that their lives were a mediocre television series. Mrs. Givings has been swallowed-up by what Heidegger calls, "the They." All of Mrs. Givings' identity has been projected on to a fictional entity called: "a middle class suburban housewife." This must be a fate worse than death. In fact, it is a kind of death. Please do not recommend such a fate to the rest of us. (Again: "'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review" and "'Invasion': A Movie Review.")
Are we any different? How's the "War on Terror" these days? Has anyone seen an interview with Ms. Rice? Mr. Bush? Are these our political leaders? Or is the White House in the Bush years a bad fifties' television show entitled: "Would you like everything to be simple again?" Thank goodness that America has decided not to "Leave it to Beaver" (John McCain), but to take our destiny into our own hands in order to define ourselves to the world. ("'For America to Lead Again': A Speech for President Barack Obama.")
April's feeling for art and ideas may have led her to write as a scholar or critic with genuine originality and insight. She might have contributed to our political and legal conversation. For example, our discussions concerning abortion which -- as I am repeating for the slow-witted -- would not be a legal option until well after these events took place in the story.
This is a feminist film making it abundantly clear that the cost of the LIE that these Stepford people were forced to live and their inchoate struggle for freedom -- a struggle for freedom that would define the sixties' wars and that certainly persists until today -- would serve as the identity of a generation. ("All You Need is Love.")
Like Panasonic appliances, April is "only slightly ahead of her time." April is a Romantic in a positivistic age, whose silent scream mirrors Edvard Munch's canvas as a symbol of human despair. ("Germaine Greer's Romanticism.")
April's identity, as a free woman, may well have been unlivable in her social circumstances. Are women's freely-chosen identities "livable" today? I know a woman who would say, "they can be."
"All art aspires constantly to the condition of music." (Hans Georg Gadamer and others)
Mr. DiCaprio is magnificent in this role. We forget what a good actor this man happens to be because of his entrapment in the Hollywood leading man category. I have a similar problem. My philosophical views are not taken seriously because of my shapely legs. I refuse to take off my shirt to play a part in any movie. ("A Doll's Aria.")
DiCaprio can act! This may be his finest work. DiCaprio and Winslet (as well as Kathy Bates) deserve nominations. Kudos to the actor playing the crazy son of the crazier Mrs Givings, a lunatic whose "misgivings" concerning normality would be shared by the sixties' generation. To appreciate the achievement in terms of self-invention of, say, Jane Fonda and Angela Davis, take a good look at these characters in Revolutionary Road. (Only one new inserted "error" is not too bad.)
The excellent British actor who plays the deliberately deaf husband (Richard Easton) is symbolic of you, audience members, who are unwilling to pay attention to the narcotizing myths constructed for your benefit by the few people who presume to run your life: "We are here to instruct you. We will condition you to be good."
Mr. Cheney? America has begun to tune out ALL politicians as irrelevant. These are the words ("this is for your own good!") that Postmodernist America (abnormal) speaks to the world. Modernist America (normal) seeks to live those words. I cannot say which is the more onerous or unethical task, to speak the words or to live them? ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
This would be a good time to insert another "error" -- right before the next set of indictments in Jersey City.
The great crescendo at the climax of the film is Ms. Winslet standing at a window peering into a "real world" that she cannot enter from her carpeted prison, as blood drips on to an expensive rug, matching perfectly her tasteful outfit. April's earlier running into the forest is a moment of genuine nakedness for this character who is fully clothed at all times. Nature is the Romantic's heaven.
"The blood spilled upon the sands" is clearly a Christian iconographic gesture -- it is sacrificial, atoning, signaling death's entrance into a well-appointed drawing room carrying a bottle of wine and dessert, as one more dinner guest with splendid manners. The ethos of fifties' and early sixties' America requires that death be a gentleman or a lady. No elbows at the table and mind your language. No wonder they're inserting "errors" in this text. I am questioning the national mythology of "success." But then, so is this movie. Only two generations later, April Wheeler would become Ms. Winslet's "Bitsy" in The Life and Death of David Gale.
The forest (nature) is the great Romantic image of authenticity and truth that is transformed by Carl Jung into the "collective subconscious." April stands next to the tree of life, then returns to her home -- "East of Eden?" Steinbeck and all of the chroniclers of suburbia, Cheever, Updike, Styron, Roth and Bellow (adding Jewish guilt) may be quoted. This is Sam Mendes' "Wapshot Chronicle." ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "'The Fountain': A Movie Review.")
To preserve this set of illusions there is plenty of booze, cigarettes, adultery (the bimbette in the secretarial pool "meant nothing" to Frank). April's pointless adultery means even less. Despite the pleasant fictions of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, there was a lot of screwing around in the fifties and sixties.
This movie displays a "real" Doris Day's and Rock Hudson's complex and stormy relationship. America's schizoid condition between fantasies of absurd normality or perfection (sometimes lies that are real enough for those living them!) and gruesome horror in the form of Mi Lai, or Baghdad, racism and social injustice -- organized crime evaluates your ethics in New Jersey! -- must give rise to cognitive dissonance. America baffles the rest of the planet. But then, we astonish and mystify ourselves, both when we walk on the moon and when we wipe out more than 500,000 children in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operation "desert storm," then "rolling thunder." Hasta la vista, baby! History has become a bad Hollywood action movie.
The Robert Downey part in, I think, "Days of Thunder" a movie about Vietnam movies -- which was misunderstood by the critics -- dramatizes the "Hollywoodizing of identity" for African-Americans as window dressing in increasingly unreal "war" movies, also for all of us. The joke in that film was on Hollywood, not against African-Americans or any other ethnic group. Actors are the only people who should be offended after seeing that movie. Maybe directors and producers also were satirized. It is possible that you cannot offend actors. This is fortunate in a business that requires a thick skin from its denizens.
Who are we now? What do we really believe? How do we appear to our neighbors? How would you assess, objectively, our actions on the world stage? What do people see about the Wheelers that they do not see about themselves? What do others see about America that we do not see? Are you like the Wheelers? ("'The Prisoner': A Review of an AMC Television Series.")
Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Winslet will not resolve these issues for you. They merely confront you with them and invite your interpretations. Actors are delighted to discover aspects of the stories and their characters that they may not have seen. If their work on screen is genuine art, then they will have placed a question on your plate. All of the actors in this movie create genuine art, vital, living aesthetic work, which must remain unfinished -- until you come along to complete the encounter.
Frank and April are America. Do you love or hate them? A little of both? Please discuss.
