Talking 'Bout a Revolution

I HAVEN'T REALLY paid much attention to Variety over the last little while. Its naked and sickening pro-conglom slant during the recent Hollywood Labour disputes blew out its credibility on everything else far as I'm concerned. I prefer checking out Nikki for the skinny. But columnists are another story. Brian Lowry has a thoughtful piece on Revolutionary Road vs. Mad Men, underscoring why, if you're about writing characters today -- TV, and not film, is your medium:

The look and tone of these projects is strikingly similar. At their core, the cable program and the Sam Mendes-directed movie deal with the Drapers and the Wheelers, couples trapped by the social mores and rigid expectations of the Eisenhower/Cold War/pre-Vietnam era -- before the free-love, anti-establishment movement reshaped the country in a manner from which the old guard has never fully recovered.

ACTUALLY, I LIKED "Revolutionary Road" quite a lot, for many of the reasons I enjoy "Mad Men." But while the story resonated, it also suffered for trying to convey the dissolution of a relationship in roughly two hours time.

Frank and April Wheeler, the feuding couple played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, are forced to make the turn from loving to venom-spewing at speeds a high-performance car would envy. His office fling comes and goes while leaving that subplot relatively untapped. And amid this marital tumult their young kids virtually disappear, until one begins wondering where the tykes are while mom and dad are going through all this noisy discord.

While mainstream movies have become the understandable vehicle of choice for visualizing comic books and graphic novels, more intricate dramatic storytelling has found a particularly satisfying home in television, capitalizing on the medium's novelistic latitude to develop characters over extended arcs, whether that's "The Wire" -- really the great American novel in TV form -- or programs such as "Big Love" and "Mad Men."

It's been a long road (more evolutionary than revolutionary) to this juncture. Yet after years in which TV has suffered from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis movies, at certain key nodes those lines have been erased -- so much so that many of this generation's finest creative moments are, indeed, being televised.

It's my honest opinion that, idiots like Michel Arpin notwithstanding, the period that started in about 1999 with The Sopranos and the West Wing will one day be talked about in terms not dissimilar to the 1970's in filmmaking. Whether that ride's coming to an end or not is not for me to say.