Nine years after he explored the detrimental results of getting stuck in the materialistic American dream in the '90s in American Beauty, director Sam Mendes now rewinds the clock to the 1950s to show that pursuit was even more ensnaring in Revolutionary Road. The suburban houses and the picket fences are comforting but just staying in stillness in nice environments reveals a dead emptiness inside. The sense of emptiness is particularly punishing for a married couple as young as 30-year-olds Frank and April Wheeler.
The movie is adapted from the acclaimed 1961 novel by Richard Yates (which I sadly have not read and will at some point) and is also notable for the first pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet since James Cameron’s gigantic critical and commercial hit, Titanic. Leave any illusions for the romantic sparks to fly between them at the door though. This story, after the initial love at first sight, is way past the idealistic honeymoon phase of the marriage and at the tragic point when the young couple realizes they are like sandpaper in dealing with the hollow entrapment of suburban life.
In the opening scene, we meet Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) at a party where they talk excitedly about their own fantasies and dreams (which is the only time in the movie anyone is excited in a positive way). She claims she wants to be an actress while his interest in random exploration to find his true aspirations seems enticing to her. In the next scene, however, we see that she is not much of an actress in an embarrassingly bad production of The Petrified Forest. The fierce fight they subsequently have on the way home sets their relationship dynamic and tone for the rest of the movie, where she refuses to talk about it and he insists he wants to talk and work it out, only to end up mocking and insulting the atrocious acting he has witnessed to her face.
Thus, April stays at home doing dull household chores while Frank commutes to a job he hates in New York City making business machines and sits idly in his own tiny cubicle in a sea of cubicles (reminiscent of Kevin Spacey’s Lester Burnham in the same situation). When bored, he has no qualms picking up an office secretary and having an affair with her. We barely even see the two children they had at an early age because, to them, the children are like moving luggage that just waltz in and out of their lives.
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.
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