The Film

The feel-bad movie of 2008, Revolutionary Road is a masterful look at relationships, ambition and the way we fool ourselves viewed through the lens of ‘50s suburban discontent. Director Sam Mendes explores many similar themes to those in his Oscar-winning debut American Beauty, but here, they’re stripped of all irony, leaving the viewer with only the gut-wrenching reality of how two people in extremely close proximity can be miles apart. Despite its consistent downbeat tone, Revolutionary Road is intensely watchable, worth viewing more than once for its stellar acting, superb costume and set design, and its chokingly claustrophobic atmosphere evoked by Mendes’ direction.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet re-team as Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who meet at a party, flirting and making small talk. She wants to be an actress. He doesn’t know what he wants out of life, but he wants something big. In these opening scenes, they’re happy together. It’s going to be one of the few times in the film that’s the case.

Jump forward several years, and they’re married. April has pretty much failed as an actress and Frank has settled into a dull bureaucratic job selling office machines in New York City. Their suburban Connecticut existence is everything they hoped to avoid. Only a few minutes into the film, they’re at each other’s throats, and that’s part of what makes Revolutionary Road so successful – rather than going the tried-and-true route of showing a relationship slowly disintegrating, we join them post-disintegration. This isn’t a film about the unraveling of a marriage; things are totally unraveled almost from the very beginning. Rather, we get to watch them try to claw their way back up into happiness, deciding they’re going to make a new life for themselves by moving to Paris. Happiness seems to return, but hardly anyone can be honest enough with themselves in this film to realize that it’s all just a show.

Both DiCaprio and Winslet give career performances here, and it’s only the politics of award season that vaulted Winslet’s lesser performance in The Reader over this one, which was far more emotionally resonant. The great Oscar-nominated supporting performance by Michael Shannon as a mentally ill character who seems to be the only one willing to speak the truth is also magnetic, and entertaining in an unsettlingly funny way.

Article Author: Dusty Somers

Dusty Somers hails from Seattle, and is a journalism student at the University of Oklahoma. He enjoys spending time and watching films with his wife, and looks forward to their imminent return to the great Northwest.

Visit Dusty Somers's author page — Dusty Somers's Blog