Revolutionary Road (DVD)
APPROX. 118 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 2008 - MPA RATING: R
" ...more of a sedate lecture on values than a revealing or entertaining look at life and love.
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Upward mobility. Urban angst. Flight to the suburbs. Spouse, family, country home, wide lawns. Unexpected strife beneath the idyllic surface. Sound familiar? Director Sam Mendes won all the big awards in 1998 for his satiric "American Beauty," so can you blame him for trying again in 2008 with "Revolutionary Road"?
This time, however, he is far more serious, working from screenwriter Justin Haythe's adaptation of Richard Yates's angry 1961 novel. Indeed, Mendes is serious to a fault. Maybe too serious. This time out, his picture didn't win any Oscars and, if judging by the length of time it stayed around my neighborhood theaters is any indication, it didn't win over many filmgoers, either. Watching "Revolutionary Road" is a little like looking through your parents' or your grandparents' old photo albums from the 1950s. Look, there's grandma and grandpa. Didn't they look so young back then? They were just kids. Look, there's grandma in the living room; and there's grandpa in the back yard next to the barbeque. And that was their house; a very, very fine house. And so it goes.
The movie, a study of the complexities of marriage and the complexities of the emerging new world of the 1950s, follows the rise and fall of a seemingly typical and content young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, and their two young children. Frank and April met in New York City just after the Second World War, when Frank was a returning vet and April an aspiring actress. They fell in love and moved to a home in the Connecticut countryside; Frank got an office job with a big firm in the city, and April became a housewife. The house sits on Revolutionary Road, the "better" part of the community, upscale and away from the common folk, like plumbers and such.
Every director's favorite performers, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, play the young couple, so you know you're in for some heavy drama. They love, they bicker, they argue, they fight. We see that Frank is initially glib and brash but soon adjusts to conformity and the desire for money. He browbeats April for her aspirations and for not being as practical as he is. A woman's place, after all, was in the home. April, on the other hand, is more of a free spirit; she wants to move the family to Paris and live a kind of Bohemian lifestyle. He's too afraid and welcomes a new pregnancy to keep them where they are.
It appears that Mendes and the book intend for the viewer to interpret virtually everything symbolically (and not a little ironically). The move to "Revolutionary Road," for instance, is a rather obvious reference to the young married couple longing for something new and extreme for them, a home of their own in the country rather than an apartment in the city, a revolution in their lives. Her name, April, represents the beginning of new life, the spring of one's being. Frank turns thirty in the story, thirty a traditional turning point in a person's life, marking a time of change from carefree youth to mature responsibility. And so forth.
It's gets to be a bit much. The Realtor, Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), and her husband (Richard Easton) see the Wheelers as a lovely young couple, possibly a good influence on their son (Michael Shannon), a high-strung, emotionally disturbed fellow who has a Ph.D in mathematics but lives in an institution. He's the enlightened idiot of the tale, the person who sees things as they really are. At least he brings a little life to the story. Next door to the Wheelers live Shep and Milly (David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn), the "anchored" neighbors, the pragmatic straight arrows. The story doesn't miss a beat.
Everyone in the film has unfilled longings; everyone feels frustrated and unhappy in his or her own way; everyone lives a life of "hopeless emptiness." Incessant smoking and social drinking are the diversions of choice, along with extramarital affairs. Frank works at a job he hates, but it pays well. April becomes tired of playing the dutiful housewife and wants change, any change, something more than being "ordinary."
