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Revolutionary Road Review
26 Jan 2009
Critics rating: 4 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Revolutionary Road

Ever felt that you're wasting the best years of your life in drudgery? That your marriage has gone as stale as your all but forgotten youthful hopes and dreams?

That things would be so much better if you walked out on your job and took off for a new start in… let’s say, Paris?

Well if you haven’t, just wait, my child. At any rate, that’s how Frank and April Wheeler are feeling circa 1956. He commutes from their handsome suburban Connecticut home on Revolutionary Road, working for the same firm his dad did, not out of love or loyalty but just because it was the course that fell to him. She’s a mom, a housewife, and definitely not the actress she thought she might have been. A stab at am-dram in the film’s breathtakingly incisive second scene conclusively shuts off that escape route. (The lightning speed with which their romance hits the rocks is director Sam Mendes?s most inspired cinematic touch.)

Cast details

April knows they’re better than this and she wants Frank to know it too. If he doesn’t there’s surely no hope for their marriage. And the thing is, he wants to believe it. He can coast through his work day, dip into the secretary pool as he fancies, but in the immortal words of Peggy Lee, Leiber and Stoller: is that all there is?

Mendes tapped into this disillusionment before in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. Revolutionary Road is a more somber affair, though April’s plan to sell up and get a job in la belle France while Frank “finds himself” is arguably as deluded as Kevin Spacey’s belated decision to drop out in the earlier film. Certainly that’s how their non-plussed friends and neighbours see it.

Revolutionary Road: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet

Based on a well-regarded (as opposed to widely read) 1961 novel by Richard Yates, the film is a domestic melodrama with an element of suspense. Will they get to Paris? Played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (reunited a decade after Titanic) they make an attractive couple, so we’re pulling for them. But if one of them talks about backing down, is that a betrayal, or just a return to common sense?

Everything in this movie is shrewd and well done. As a filmmaker Mendes always seems in control of every aspect of his material – to a fault, sometimes, in over-designed films like Road to Perdition. Here the acting is raw and abrasive enough to cut through the comfortable suburban surface – Winslet is magnificent as the obviously intelligent but directionless April, and DiCaprio suggests how easily a certain kind of man can be seduced by the road of least resistance.

As the movie goes on, the limitations of this ostensibly golden couple become harder to ignore. Their banality is thrown into sharp relief by two outstanding scenes with Michael Shannon (from Bug) as the mentally troubled son of the Wheeler’s friend and realtor (played by Kathy Bates). She brings him over for tea because they’re the closest thing to intellectuals she knows, and her boy John was an academic before his breakdown. She hopes some of the Wheelers’ apparent prosperity and grace will rub off on him.

Overwhelmingly, this is a tough, unhappy tale, a feel bad movie told with vigor and expertise.

Instead, they announce their plan to up sticks for France and John can’t contain his delight at this wholesale rejection of the American way. “Hopeless emptiness!” he echoes, when Frank explains their thinking. “Now you’ve said it! Plenty of people are on to the emptiness. But it takes real guts to see the hopelessness!”

Shannon?s unsettling performance is so hard-edged, abrasive and funny, it threatens to skewer the whole show right there and then. Indeed, the film’s actual climax feels phony and contrived in comparison with the crisis this bone fide non-conformist precipitates in the Wheeler home.

Overwhelmingly, this is a tough, unhappy tale, a feel bad movie told with vigor and expertise. It must be said, it’s a story we’ve heard before, many times. The themes still resonate, I think (see also: Little Children) but the 1950s setting does factor… You wonder if April couldn’t have got a job in the city and found a decent nursery? Even so, I’m surprised, and disappointed, that the film should have been rejected so dramatically in last week’s Oscar nominations. (It received three, but only one – for Shannon – in the big six categories.)

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