"Revolutionary Wisdom:
A Reflection the Film Revolutionary Road"

Sermon Preached By Bruce Sanguin
March 15, 2009

1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Exodus

When April and Frank meet at a party, April tells him that she thinks he is maybe the most interesting man she has ever met. It’s post WW2. Frank served in the war. So, he’s seen a bit of the world. Been to Paris. He is a little full of himself. April is young and pretty. They fall in love and get married. She, like Frank, is convinced right from the start that they are not like the rest of deluded masses. It’s the 1950’s, and they know that they are above the rush to suburbia, two kids, a dog, and a solid pension. They both have big plans.

 

Oh sure, on the outside their lives might look the same as the others – they do end up in Suburbia with two kids, and a manicured lawn. Frank does join the hoards of other men in suits and hats boarding the train for the secure, but meaningless, office job. In Frank’s case, it’s “office machines”. He’s working for the same company that his father worked for. Frank returns home every night, his brief case in hand, for his evening pre-dinner martini, loving prepared by his wife. On the weekends, they have their favorite couple over and critique the very lifestyle that they are rapidly becoming caricatures of. But they are above it all. They have big plans. This is all temporary, Frank assures himself.

 

But it’s the 1950’s. The beatnik generation has not yet emerged. Father still knows best. There is no space for April’s creative yearnings. Inside she knows that she is more than a mother and a wife. These roles don’t define her. She is her own person. She studied acting after all. She even joined a community theatre company. It was below her, but it met a need. When the company’s first play tanks, April and Frank have their first of what it is turn into many fights.

 

April needs to believe that Frank is as committed to something more for their lives as she is. Over ubiquitous martinis and cigarettes, this is constant source of conversation. She props Frank up, reassuring him of his brilliance. But Frank can’t figure out what the alternative might be. Desperation and frustration simmers within both of them.

 

One day, April hatches a plan. She cooks her husband his favorite dinner and announces that at this time next year, they will be in Paris. Why not? What’s stopping them? In Paris, women can get good paying jobs. Frank will be able to “find himself” at last. Who cares if it’s a role reversal? In Europe it doesn’t matter. At first, Frank is dubious. What about the pension? What’s he going to do while she’s out working? What kind of a man lets his wife work? But he comes around. They announce to the world that they are loading up the kids, cashing in their chips and buying a one-way ticket to Paris. Freedom is in the air.

 

But secretly, Frank harbours doubts about the plan – primarily about himself. He begins to realize that his bravado about being more intelligent and creative than his neighbours may be just that. Sure he has a certain perspective on it all. He’s outside of it. But it’s not at all clear to him what exactly he is inside of or what’s inside of him that would suggest the kind of depth or courage it would require to take such a step. So, when an offer comes along to get into the budding field of computers, it becomes Frank’s secret default position. He won’t need to go through with the Paris plan and risk discovering that he actually is just like all the rest of suburbia.

 

Then April has an unexpected pregnancy. She wants an abortion so that it won’t hold them back from their plans. He feigns repulsion at the idea. In truth he wants no more children. He doesn’t even know the two he has – they are strangers that he steps over on a Saturday morning, while they play in the living room, wondering where they came from. But Frank will use the pregnancy as his out. He launches a step-by-step plan to persuade April about the folly of an abortion. Frank turns into Father-knows-best, but it’s disingenuous and April knows it. She begins to hate Frank. From this point forward, the story turns very dark.

 

So, this is Revolutionary Road, a film based on Richard Yates’ classic novel by the same title. I was so moved by the film that I went out and immediately bought and read the novel. The director is Sam Mendes, who deconstructed suburban culture in an equally devastating manner in the film, American Beauty. The Oscars snubbed Revolutionary Road, but for me it’s the film of the year. Kate Winslet could have won an Oscar for her performance in this movie as well. Leonardo DeCaprio is brilliant.

 

In reflecting on why the film was so moving to me, three reasons come to mind. First, it was a powerful commentary on how much more difficult this journey to wholeness is for women than for men. Frank had options. April Wheeler was stuck and ultimately driven almost mad by the relative lack of alternatives available to her. Her fate was in her husband’s hands. Remember this was pre-Alan Ginsberg and the beatnik era. The 1960’s and Betty Freidan had not yet happened. Honouring the feminine principle with its fierce longing to break free was rare at best. This is not to suggest that men were not also confined by societal and cultural chains. Nobody escapes these chains. But for whatever reasons, it’s women’s struggle to be free to define themselves that moved me.

 

Secondly, I felt compassion for my own mother. She was approximately the same age as April Wheeler when she had three children under the age of five. It caused me to wonder what she did with her evolutionary stirrings to transcend the roles of mother and wife. I’m sure I’ll find out after she reads this!

 

Finally, the film is a wonderful portrayal of what has been called the “blessed unrest” at the heart of life – the evolutionary urges to transcend the status quo and discover deeper dimensions of freedom and fullness of being. In my own theology this unrest is a movement of Spirit. But we shouldn’t be overly romantic about these yearnings. Spirit, understood in this way, is not gentle. In the Bible, God is portrayed as a Mighty power, present not just as tender acceptance, but also as the One who requires Abraham and Sarah to set out on a journey with no apparent destination – just a promise. The Hebrews are called to claim their freedom from Egyptian oppression, but they are not thrilled by this call to freedom. Jonah is required to go where he doesn’t want to go. Jesus calls his disciples to follow him to the cross – to lose themselves that they might truly know themselves. Who wants to go there?

 

Acceptance of this call to unrest involves transgressing boundaries – stepping out to claim your freedom when there are all kinds of pressures, inside and out, that want you to stay put. In the First Testament today, we read the 10 commandments. They represent the basic minimum required for a civil society. Essentially, the 10 commandments are written to quell the violence in the human heart. But beyond these commandments there are unwritten cultural commandments. These commandments are different, in that their transgression paradoxically fulfills Spirit’s intention and yet at the same time initiates cultural punishment. One of these is: You shall not venture out beyond the bounds of the cultural status quo. This commandment is made to be broken, of course, but as the story of Garden of Eden makes clear, there are costs. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. They transcend imposed limits, but both the limits and their transgression are part of the game. It’s just part of what it means to be human. Their eyes are opened and with that they are unceremoniously tossed out of Paradise.

 

And so it was with the Wheelers. They lived in the perfect house on Revolutionary Road, and something within them was indeed revolting. Like in the Adam and Eve myth, it was the woman who ate the forbidden fruit – she dared to imagine life in Paris! Is this the role of the feminine urge within both men and women – to invite us to attain our full evolutionary capacity? What is your Paris? The Wheelers ate the forbidden fruit of inviting the evolutionary unrest into their lives. They were cast out of the garden of the traditional 1950’s cultural status quo. Their resulting misery was caused by Frank’s desire to go back – much like the character in the Matrix who just wants to return to a life of blissful illusion, rather than the suffering of living in reality. But an angel with a flaming sword guards the entrance of the status quo. There is no going back once you’re eyes are opened. But for Frank, there was no going forward either. He lived in the agony of no-man’s zone – not really alive and yet still breathing. Frank is every man and every woman, who cannot go forward and cannot go back.

 

What frightens Frank as much as anything else is that he gets a vision of the future that he’s toying with one night over dinner. The Wheeler’s kindly invite their real estate neighbour over for dinner. She brings her adult son, a PhD. mathematician who has ended up in a psychiatric ward. She wants him to meet some “normal” people. This turns out to be perhaps the most memorable scenes in the movie, which won the actor an Oscar. It turns out that the crazy son sees reality more clearly than the Wheelers and like an Old Testament prophet devastates their pretense with the truth – before the main course has started! He has seen the future. He has forged the path for the beatniks, and society has deemed him to be insane. Frank saw the future in the crazy wisdom of a man who had been crucified by society – and was not going there.

 

Paul talks about this crazy wisdom in the reading from the letter to the Corinthians. It is foolishness to the Greeks, he wrote. And to those who desire “positive” signs as evidence of wisdom, this wisdom is offensive. But, “we proclaim Christ crucified”, Paul writes (1 Corinthians 1: 18-25). This is the crazy wisdom, or the foolish wisdom of crucifixion. It looks, for all the world, like defeat, not success. It’s anything but an elaborate, conceptual treatise on the nature of truth. This wisdom is hanging from a cross – spoken by a crazy man who lives in psychiatric ward. It’s the wisdom that says the only way forward into the future is through self-emptying, the ultimate symbol of which is the cross.

 

For Jesus, the blessed unrest coursing through him was a vision of the Kingdom of God. He could see it, feel it, touch it – he embodied it: he had a vision of what the world would look like if people allowed themselves to know the heart of God. At dinner parties, he would describe his vision. He would speak of wisdom’s ways, the emergence of the feminine divine that would right the ship and move all creation closer to the mind and heart of God.

 

April’s Kingdom of God was Paris, France. The symbol of what represents the future that wants to be born through us is different for each of us. But what is similar is that its realization depends on our willingness to embody the cost. April didn’t get to Paris, and without giving away the ending, her self-emptying was absolute. Her suffering and the suffering of women like her gave birth to an Easter nonetheless – the resurrection of millions of women that still awaits final expression for millions more.