DiCaprio: a right lemmon. It's tragic, honestly

Having read the stoically-good natured response of Richard Yates' biographer, Blake Bailey, to the discomfiting news that Sam Mendes is to shoot an adaptation of the former's glorious novel, Revolutionary Road, without using Bailey's expertise, I was compelled to write a response. Modern stars and directors seem largely to have well-placed hearts and good taste but apparent delusions of prowess make for heavy-handed morality-fests.



Read Bailey's article here and my response as a comment or below:



It’s Tragic, Honestly


Blake Bailey’s unrealised vision of trading artistic punches on the set of Revolutionary Road with Sam Mendes whilst chain-smoking - the two perhaps later knocking back Martinis and falling out over the Clintons - is positively Yatesian. His disappointment at its elusiveness seems tongue-in-cheek here, but Hollywood’s decision to overlook arguably the foremost living authority on Yates and his art seems either arbitrarily cruel or criminally ignorant and is reminiscent of the New Yorker’s decision to turn down every single one of Yates’ short stories throughout his life - now acknowledged masterpieces by anyone whose opinion is worth a damn: Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan, Andre Dubus, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Russo to name but five disciples. Similarly, as Bailey reflects, Yates’ screenplay for Lie Down in Darkness, despite being lauded by all, was stillborn. I can only implore Bailey to view the unforgivable decision to overlook his expertise as typical Yates’ bad luck. Perhaps this glaring omission hints at the scale of artistic license Mendes intends to take; if so it may be no bad thing – better he mangle the novel beyond all recognition than sell Yates’ subtle masterpiece short with a heavy-handed American Beauty-esque treatment whereby furrow-browed, honey-haired Oscar nominees shout - less-than-subtly, but just about implicitly - “Suburbia is hell!” Yates’ work, though unquestionably at odds with the diabolic grip of provincial life, simply gasps and splutters between emphysemic outbursts “Suburbia is everything.”


I feel that Yates would balk at Mendes’ choice for leading man on both an artistic and general aesthetic level. DiCaprio’s off-screen persona should not diminish his suitability for any role but, let’s face it, it does: who can honestly say that they have sat through a Polanski film and not let their mind wander to Jack Nicholson’s Jacuzzi in 1977? DiCaprio – or more accurately, an audience’s idea of DiCaprio – will only be a successful Frank Wheeler if the Yates-savvy audience can allow him to stop being Leo. It is then inevitable that we juxtapose DiCaprio, Wheeler and indeed Yates himself, who is undeniably recognisable in Wheeler. So then, the fact that we all instinctively feel that DiCaprio is too young for the part of Frank Wheeler, despite the fact that he is four years the character’s senior, is worth considering. Wheeler, at twenty-nine, is weathered, troubled. For all the screaming at the sky that Leo pulled off in Romeo and Juliet and the seventeen years’ ageing as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, he still looks remarkably full of vitality; what’s more, the boy oozes success and fortune whilst boasting a wholesome, though taciturn, joie de vivre and a concern for social and environmental issues (he has mounted solar panels on his mansion and gave up time to work with orphans in Mozambique whilst filming Blood Diamond). Whilst the thirty-three year old DiCaprio has won major awards of global prominence into the double figures, Yates’ masterpiece, despite being nominated for the National Book Award, only provided its author fleeting success and relatively meagre revenue. What’s more, it would be unsurpassed both in sales and acclaim during Yates’ lifetime and thus proved to serve as a constant reminder of unfulfilled promise: Despite the fact that Yates nearly killed himself writing Revolutionary Road and lost his marriage during its conception, the novel would be his one crowning glory and it would serve as a reminder of what he’d had and lost at the age of thirty-five, as he slid into alcoholism, manic depression and poverty whilst continuing the self-flagellatory process that was his fiction writing, never to again taste mass-acclaim. By way of anecdotal comparison, DiCaprio – having ‘washed up’ at the age of twenty-five – despondently whined to Time magazine about the Titanic days, "I'll never reach that state of popularity again, and I don't expect to. It's not something I'm going to try to achieve either." He didn’t need to: the philanthropic Messrs. Spielberg and Scorcese did all the trying for him and won him enough silverware to sink a proverbial cruise ship. Yates may have been one of Pageant magazine’s ‘Ten Americans to Watch’ at the beginning of 1963, but, in May of this year, Leo was voted among Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’.


As an important footnote to the above tirade, I feel that I should further acknowledge the fact that DiCaprio’s dissimilarity to Frank Wheeler and Richard Yates shouldn’t matter and that, as a uniquely gifted actor, he has the ability to metamorphose into whatever persona the script requires. I should not be judging his credentials by casting aspersions on his body of work, humanitarian conscience, professional success or physiognomy. His talent for deftly delivering demanding roles (deranged tycoon Howard Hughes in The Aviator, retarded Arnie in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?) is unquestionable and, if he digs deep, I’ve no doubt he could portray the tormented, inveterate alcoholic Frank Wheeler, very clearly destined for destruction. He may also come up trumps with an uncomfortably sterile, facilely-redemptive and passionless widowed Wheeler, grinning inanely like a lobotomised Randle McMurphy after April’s death He may be good. He may be good enough to tease the Academy. However – and this is purely going on previous form – even if he’s amazing in the role suggested, he will struggle to grasp Wheeler’s failings because how on earth could he understand them? It’s not a case of thespian quality. Even Hoffman or DeNiro would find it a big ask to sit around being methodical failures – not troubled geniuses or unacknowledged masters, but abject failures - and DiCaprio, who has known only success, surely has no reserves to pull from. He can’t imagine how it would feel to take on an advertising job for years whilst wrestling with unrecognised writing talent; he can’t accept responsibility for an overpowering, hideously-embarrassing and destructive mother; he can’t beat himself up remorselessly for failing to save an alcoholic sister from her abusive husband. And even if he could trawl the depths of his unquestionable empathy for the human condition, could he deliver it with the degree of subtle humour and pathos that it requires? The disparate mixture of an earthy, humanistic celebration of life and a self-deploring psycho-sickness all tied together by army anecdotes and recollections of movie tunes: it’s a big ask from the lad.


In 1961Yates himself dreamed of casting Jack Lemmon in the role of Frank Wheeler - a choice that, in light of his subsequent body of work, seemed initially, well… odd to me. Frank, like the vast majority of Yates’ protagonists, may have been prone to painful faux pas of a wincingly pathetic degree but he was not the prudish, emasculated buffoon that we have come to associate with Lemmon’s most well-known performances, principally The Odd Couple, made seven years after Revolutionary Road was published. However, an Apartment-era Lemmon – or perhaps more his character, C. C. Baxter – is an interesting consideration and it must be this incarnation that Yates had in mind. Baxter is an unsatisfied white collar slave, lonely and put-upon; he’s not handsome enough to warrant the pretty girls’ immediate attention but is endearing in his own way and in possession of an old-fashioned gallantry, whilst undeniably embroiled in a seediness of thought that conflicts with his desire for a beauty – and wisdom – of a higher order than the kind that mid twentieth-century America can offer. He’s not knock-out handsome and he’s aware of his shortcomings - physical and emotional - but he’s a sweet, honest and humorous guy with more to say than the average Tom, Dick or Leo. He’s the kind of guy that deserves the girl; he’s the kind of guy who might even get a shot at the girl; he’s the kind of guy who sure as hell won’t keep the girl. There’s a lot of stuff going on beneath the warm smiles; there’s a discomforting lack of focus in the sparkling, darting eyes; there’s a tangible thudding of raised blood pressure in the dramatic irony he is so often the victim of. What’s most startling for a Revolutionary Road fan is how uncool this version of Frank would be. We know he’s awkward, occasionally gauche and undeniably punching above his weight with April, but he’s cool, right? He’s an intellectual who can regale his drinking buddies with anecdotes of Parisian whores, we feel; “A ‘tough’ look at the squalid heart of the American Dream” it may be but it is tough, isn’t it? There’s enough Hemingway in it to warrant that, surely. But apparently Yates took a dimmer – or at least less heroic - view of his protagonist. We get less of a misunderstood Salingerian nut-job (essentially heroic with reluctantly victim-like symptoms) and more of the neurotic, Oedipal pedant (a la Portnoy or Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum from Something Happened – a sure-fire Lemmon role if there ever was one.) If DiCaprio can play Wheeler with Lemmon’s gentle, faltering brilliance, then Bob Mitchum can understudy Jerry Lewis. DiCaprio could have embroidered a decent Holden fifteen years ago; he could have out-Gatsbyed Redford no problem, but Frank Wheeler?


Of course, Lemmon never did get the role because the film was never made and, had it been, he should probably have left it well alone for the sake of his career. I would like to see it made but I’m not so sure it can or should be done. As Blake Bailey declares, “Revolutionary Road is one of the most depressing novels ever written,” and depressing books have difficult journeys onto the silver screen. Some directors – Mike Nichols for one (who, incidentally, directed The Odd Couple on Broadway in ’65) – use humour savagely, brilliantly to ease the transition (think The Graduate or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) whereby the characters (undeniably Yatesian) belly-laugh over their failings - like putting fingers in one’s ears to become voluntarily deaf. DiCaprio – and, believe it or not, I am actually a fan of some of his work – does not do laughs, savage, subtle or otherwise. He can ham it up like Burton and even scream like Liz Taylor but he’s never a hoot. He is more likely to do the things one is supposed to do when troubled: stare confusedly at a point in the distance; raise one’s eyebrows; cry whilst shouting with real tears and snot; he wouldn’t feel it appropriate to pull a Humphrey Bogart impression or dig out an old army tune. His diligence, professional conscience and good taste in scripts and directors is unquestionable, though – and should he not be held in high esteem for choosing to take on this role? Johnny Depp is farting around with Disney sequels and where exactly are the other Great White Hopes? I suppose my greatest fear, in summing up my concerns about this adaptation, is a generic one: that the square pegs of the page will be whittled down to fit the round holes of the big screen; of course this is inevitable whomever Mendes chooses to cast.


Blake Bailey deserves bounteous praise for his flawlessly-crafted tribute to the beautifully-flawed Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty – which provides just about all the Yates facts here. As he himself confesses, it is “a footstool” at six-hundred pages and I fear that its audience will inevitably, criminally, be as limited in number as Yates’ own, but it is a truly fitting tribute to one of the most talented writers of the twentieth century. Bailey’s own prose is nicely balanced between astute literary appreciation and objective sympathy and steers widely clear of sycophancy. I wish him luck with the Cheever biography, which I anticipate with excitement.


Jim Denchfield, London