Review – Revolutionary Road

From the first scene I felt I was in good hands watching Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ first film since American Beauty. The storytelling is swift and elegant, drawing us into the heart of a marriage. Like American Beauty, Revolutionary Road also takes on the big theme of conformity and risk to become who we really are.  More than an individual fable it’s about awakening to a larger possibility in our collective lives and even how to embrace a new possibility. With it’s timing, it could be an emblematic standard bearer for the Obama revolution, though Obama would hate that!

Frank (Leo DiCaprio) Wheeler is trapped in a soulless job in 50s New York while April (Kate Winslett) is a failed actress, at home with the kids.  They’re both unhappy, she more than him, and he’s just started an affair when April suggests they up and move to Paris and live a grander life based on self-realization. The movie sets up this wonderful possibility for them and for a while all is bliss and optimism for the Wheelers. But circumstances intervene in the form of a pregnancy and they renege on their dream; he takes a bigger job and April starts to seriously fall apart. They fall down a very long way.

The movie explores what happens when we compromise or give up on our dreams.  The really interesting question, and the one the movie seemed to be asking early on, is what does it take for two bright young people (well, sort of young) to really step out and follow their hearts and live a life that only they can. How do they make a life their own way?

I thought the movie was going to a brave new future exploring this question, but it showed the failure to go there instead. For me the movie gave up on itself, on its richer possibility, by not showing them walking the revolutionary road and doing what it takes to really change. Revolutionary Road suffers from the same ailment that the Wheelers do: it shrinks without really walking the walk.

But I do have to say, the actors are brilliant, the scenes from a failing  marriage are wrenching and merciless and the writing and storytelling is always intelligent and deft.

Frank and April start off down a Revolutionary Road but they don’t get a long way. No film revolution here, but there coulda been.