(Anything but a) Revolutionary Road

Did anyone else notice they changed the ending to Revolutionary Road?

True, it’s just a few small, subtle changes between the book and the film. But they mattered — to me, anyway. (SPOILER ALERT).

Why wasn’t there a telephone in the bathroom? When April Wheeler decides to orchestrate her own solution to her life — an abortion at a little over 12 weeks — the outcome is obvious to her. She knows she will lose a great deal of blood. She knows she will need an ambulance.

She knows she will probably die.

That’s why she makes a lovely breakfast, kisses her husband Frank goodbye, cleans the house and writes him a little note the morning before. She knows Frank will frantically search those final acts for an explanation (which, as far as she is concerned, he knew long ago). The least she can do is leave him without guilt and with the lovely, normal, moral home he’d wanted all those years.

That’s why she brings the telephone into the bathroom. In the book, it helps her plan go that much smoother.

But the movie? No, in the movie, she makes one last, desperate grab for life before succumbing to the steady drip of blood between her legs. She stands in front of that precious picture window and smiles in the sun, her face radiant with relief and hope. Only when the slow drip becomes a deep red stain on her carpet does she reach for the phone in the kitchen, whispering to the operator that she thinks (thinks!) she needs help.

April Wheeler would never, ever have allowed herself to bleed on the carpet, certainly not in front of the picture window, the focal point of the living room. Even as she escaped the rules of suburban life, she respected them. What else could she leave for her family but a clean home? And how best to avoid a mess but by bringing a telephone in to the bathroom before she’d even started.

They are two small details: where she put the phone and where she bled. Most likely, the changes are intended to create that moving, horrifying, incredibly powerful image of April soaked in blood standing at her picture window. The effect is immense; it is also wrong. Her blood should not hit us as a surprise. Rather, it should seem a natural, logical step in her plan to get the hell out. What else could there be?

April didn’t die by accident. She died by choice because she could not live by choice. In her final act, she tore off the victimhood forced upon her by her role as wife and mother, and as Frank says, she did it to herself. For the first time, she did something to, for and by herself.

Instead, Sam Mendes’ film tiptoes through her brazen departure, quietly gathering the threads of victimhood she left behind and fashioning them with soft, steady hands into a quaint, feminine shroud. For the millions of people who see this film, she will spend her death as she did her life — encased in someone else’s ideals.