Revolutionary Road | Coffee Spew

Posts Tagged 'Revolutionary Road'

Nominated for the Wrong Performance

Published February 12, 2010 Current Cinema Leave a Comment
Tags: Elegy, Kate Winslat, Orphan, Penelope Cruz, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, Up in the Air, Vera Farmiga, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Farmiga in Orphan

Time once again for Coffee Spew’s annual Nominated for the Wrong Performance award, which singles out an actor who in the previous year gave a better performance in a different film than the one for which they’ve been Oscar-nominated. (Previous winner was a tie between Kate Winslat, who was so much better in Revolutionary Road than The Reader, and Penelope Cruz, who gave a richer performance in Elegy than Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) This year’s winner is Vera Farmiga, wrongly nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Up in the Air instead of Best Actress for her harrowing work in Orphan. Farmiga’s sexy-cool femme fatale in Up in the Air is really more of a plot contrivance than a believable character. (I don’t know about you, but I felt cheated by the “surprise” revelation of her character’s duplicity and the manner in which the film invited us to scorn her.) Farmiga in Orphan, on the other hand, is simply astonishing playing a recovering alcoholic mother and wife whose grip on reality grows slimmer by the minute.

Richard Yates

Published March 19, 2009 Literature , Writing Leave a Comment
Tags: Blake Bailey, John Cheever, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Richard Yates (1926-1992)

Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever is receiving near-unanimous praise. (My copy arrived in the mail today from Amazon, but I’m determined to read Denis Johnson’s 2007 National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke first.) Worth recalling for a moment is Bailey’s magnificent 2003 biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty. Yates yearned but never got to see any of his short stories published in the New Yorker. Cheever, of course, along with John Updike*, was a New Yorker mainstay for decades. Even the great Yates novel, Revolutionary Road, was a hard luck case: nominated for the National Book Award in 1961, it lost—along with Catch-22—to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Yates believed his career was forever derailed by the loss. Asked once by a student if he really wanted the award, Yates replied: “Want it? Want it? Of course I wanted it. I wanted it so fucking bad I could taste it!”

*Updike, in what was apparently the final book review he wrote before his death, dissed the new Cheever bio as “a heavy, dispiriting read.”

Adaptation

Published March 3, 2009 Current Cinema , Literature Leave a Comment
Tags: Elegy, Philip Roth, Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates, Salman Rushdie, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dying Animal, The Reader

Mumbai-born novelist Salman Rushdie made news last week while speaking at Emory University in Atlanta. Story here and here. His remarks concerned recent movie adaptations of literary works. He hated Slumdog Millionaire (“patently ridiculous”) as well as its source, Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A (“a corny potboiler”). Also in for a drubbing, The Reader (“leaden, lifeless movie killed by respectability”) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (“doesn’t finally have anything to say”).

No word on what he thought about two other literary adaptations from 2008, both of which I admired: Revolutionary Road, based on the great novel by Richard Yates (discerning movie-going friends concur that Kate Winslet’s performance was stronger here than in The Reader), and Elegy, based on Philip Roth’s novella, The Dying Animal. If you haven’t seen Elegy (beautifully directed by Isabel Coixet, best known for The Secret Life of Words and My Life Without Me), take a look and see if you don’t agree: Penelope Cruz, like Winslet, gives a stronger performance in a different 2008 film than the one for which she was nominated and won an Oscar.