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Welcome to The Fourth Wall, CHIRP's weekly e-conversation on cinema. This week's subject is the 2008 movie Revolutionary Road.
This edition is written by CHIRP Radio volunteers Kevin Fullam and Clarence Ewing.
Kevin:
The honeymoon is over. Now what?
Throughout much of Hollywood's history, it seems that marriage (especially the wedding) has been utilized as a feel-good capper on many a love story. It's practically a requisite for any traditional rom-com film, right? These tales are usually told from a female perspective*, where the heroine sets out to nab her beau, and the pair ride off into the scripted sunset, either just pre- or post-altar festivities.
[*though certainly not always -- but interestingly, similarly-styled relationship films with male leads (say, High Fidelity) are seldom referred to as romantic comedies.]
I've often wondered how much of an impact these messages have on our own desire to get hitched? The pressure comes from all sides in American culture: mass media, religion... hell, even the tax code subtlety encourages it. But for decades, scant attention was paid to the discarded husks of marriages gone wrong. And with a divorce rate estimated at around 50%, we have no shortage of fractured homes in the good ol' United States.
Celluloid has caught up in recent decades, with tales about the nightmare of child-custody battles (Kramer vs. Kramer), to the insanity of knockdown, drag-out enmity (War of the Roses). But I'm not sure that any film has done a better job of illustrating the Descent Into Marital Despair that's featured in Revolutionary Road.