Intelligent enough to be mean, too stupid to stop themselves

We watched revolutionary road last night. It's a story about a couple with children who feel trapped in the suburbs, each in a relationship with someone that they have come to resent and hate.

They have sold themselves and their friends a story of being noble intellectuals trapped by the system. But we don't know whether their high expectations - to live authentically, to reject the mainstream, to be creative - are realistic or not. We see very little evidence either way. They could be the intellectuals that they want to be, equally, they could just be lazy co-dependent self indulgents.

If it's the former, if they are clever and talented, then the film is not much more than a polemic against the suburbs in which a madman is the only person that really gets it. If however, they are deluded then it becomes a lot more interesting. But how to tell?

I found myself wondering whether you can tell how smart they are from the way they argue with each other? Which, after all, is the basis of most of the film. It may be that you just can't. After all, rushes of emotion - anger, hurt, insecurity, fear - can transform the world too much to be able to lay an argument out.

But there was one feature that I thought was interesting. Not once, that I counted, did the two characters attempt to connect their argument to their wider beliefs. Every point they made seemed to be made of a nebulous anger that was simply directed at whatever their partner/opponent had just said. Like a table tennis player who can't add their own speed to a ball, they just banged anger back with anger. In it's own terms it was intelligible - they were smart enough for it to make sense. But they lacked the wit the put it in a wider context and be consistent. Maybe, if they had it, they would not have argued like that in the first place.

So, conclusion, I reckon it's a study in crushed unrealistic hopes not caged potential. And so, by studying their response - anger which they can only direct at each other - it makes itself a far better film than if it had excepted their myths about themselves. Go watch it.

P.S. Hmm... on reflection this post may say more about my own doubts than it does about the film. Here's hoping I'm not mediocre too. Ho hum.