Then, one day, she suddenly gets a wild idea for him to just quit the job he loathes and for their family to move to Paris. She says that she can support him and the kids by working as a political secretary over there (she repeatedly says, “Do you know how much they pay government secretaries over there?” as if to remove the doubt from herself that it will really be enough to sustain them) while he tries to figure out what he actually wants to do. The idea seems threatening to him at first but he eventually agrees the move might make a nice change of pace from suburban stillness and ennui.
All of that changes, however, when suddenly he is offered a promotion at his job as well as another unexpected development and it is at this point we really see the true colors of Frank and April as individuals as their desperation grows. He certainly wants to be at a place where he feels more valued, but he is much too lazy to really seek it out. She is much more of a free spirit and we start to see that her real motivation behind leaving it all behind for Paris is so that she can escape the environs where they just smoke and drink too much. She also would not have to meet the same old people such as the courteous but incredibly nosy neighbor, Mrs. Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), whose bland niceness grows uncomfortably conformist and ultimately a little scary. Then, when Mrs. Givings brings along her so-called “insane” son John (a scene-stealing and off-kilter Michael Shannon) for dinner, we see that his “insanity” is really that he is ahead of his time and is brutally honest about it. He immediately calls their bluff and sees that Frank is just a slothful man at heart and not at all attuned to April’s feelings of entrapment and loneliness.
Director Sam Mendes, who in real life is married to Winslet, is obviously comfortable re-examining suburban idleness and, with the literate adapted screenplay by Justin Haythe, does not have to rely on as much visual symbolism as he did in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. Now working regularly with cinematographer Roger Deakins (after the passing of his previous collaborator, the late, great Conrad L. Hall), he paints his suburban homes with harsher, brighter lighting and even emptier decors. He also keeps the musical score from another frequent collaborator, Thomas Newman, to a minimum, which is probably a good thing because, despite its typically haunting quality, it strikes the same notes repeatedly perhaps to reflect the redundancy of the environs.
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