From Revolutionary Road to Enchanted

Puerto Rico Christmas started yesterday (for us), via Teaneck, New Jersey. Leftist Puerto Rican doctors and rumberos, including a doctor who is also a rumbero. As I'm not feeling all that well, I spent much of the time in the room with the middle school girls, who were watching Enchanted (2007) from Disney.

What a strange movie it is, and not necessarily coherent. But what an astute work of Disney marketing it is, going so far even as to exploit Disney's own stranglehold on Princess merchandising, for which there appears to no end of American girls who clamor to purchase -- judging by the bedroom of our hosts' daughter.

The sheer weirdness for me watching Enchanted was enhanced by having listened to the first two disks of Yates's Revolutionary Road while working out, which audio book version was a Christmas gift. I've read the novel, though a millennia ago, or so it feels, when I was an undergrad, thus it couldn't speak to me -- not the east coast suburban milieu or the characters. I just didn't have the geographical, historical or cultural apparatus to understand it at all. I disliked Frank intensely though. I think I still do. What I dislike about him is his sense that he's so interesting, so superior, and he's neither. You figure this out from the moment he 'narrates.' Whether his wife is as banal I don't know or recall -- neither of them were of any interest to me back then. But so far the only vision of April we get is from Frank and from the narrator. She hasn't spoken to us herself so far, and maybe will never speak to us herself throughout. But I won't find out for a couple of weeks' worth of workouts.

Can you get further from Enchanted than Revolutionary Road? As we all know Revolutionary Road is now a highly lauded film. It seems to be part of a middle of the American century revival that includes Mad Men, which seems to me to have been much influenced by movie made from Rona Jaffe's novel, The Best of Everything (1959), and to much lesser degree, the novel and movie The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). Maybe the precursor of this revival was Far From Heaven (2002). Its look was clear and strong, colors driven to edge of their saturation, focused upon a suburban stay at home wife and mother, who falls in love with a man of color. She really falls in love with him. She isn't using him as a means to exit an empty marriage. I liked this movie and the characters very much. It felt as though these are people I might know today because we mutually enjoy each each other's company.