Revolutionary Road. An ironic title if there ever was one. Paris? Shoot, the unhappy couple should have just moved to the Village. (Although to be fair, or realistic, I'm not sure how or where two or three young children would have fit into Village life.) To me, the film raises a question: Do you have to have artistic or intellectual talent to be interesting, to oneself or others? Or might it be enough to be interestED? Anyway...one has seen and read so many accounts, fictive and not, of boho life in fifties New York City, with the jazz joints and wildish parties in apartments containing brick-and-plank bookcases. RR shows what I suppose the citizens of that world were keen to avoid. Without condescending to the “squares” at its suburban center, who once thought they were anything but that. But damn, it's grim.

And the hats. Neither Kerouac, Ginsberg, nor Cassady was ever photographed wearing a fedora. But somehow JFK gets the credit for the male hatlessness that prevailed in the U.S. after his inauguration. If you look at the scenes of businessman commuters going to work in RR, you can see that it was a notable change, perhaps, in some way, an emblematic one.