Director Sam Mendes is no stranger to dissecting the American psyche, and in Revolutionary Road he takes a merciless look at the hopes and dreams of a middle-class couple in mid-1950s suburban Connecticut. It is the American dream turned nightmare, but it avoids a narrow focus on Americana and develops into a powerful drama about what happens when unrealized dreams are allowed to fester. The results in Revolutionary Road are enthralling, but distinctly unpleasant.
Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are good-looking, intellectually ambitious, but rather ordinary young people who captivate one other at a party and subsequently get married. They get themselves a nice suburban house on the ironically named Revolutionary Road. This lovely, well-lit cottage, with its garden, its “modern” Nordic furnishings, and its well stocked bar is the graveyard of their dreams, and their love. Frank gets a job as a salesman in a company making office machines, while April finds her theatrical ambitions withering on the vine after her performance with a local amateur theater group fails to meet expectations. Unlike the Wheeler’s friends the Campbells, April is not content to laugh off this failure over a couple of drinks and get on with a pleasant, if not terribly meaningful, existence.
She has dreams, and these dreams, in her own estimation at least, make her a little bit special — a cut above the people around her who are content with their small town life that revolves around local gossip, drinks in the lounge, and a comfortable acceptance of a claustrophobic conformity.
Mendes paints an ugly picture of the world surrounding the Wheelers; limned in fear of what other people might think and envy of those who dare to step out of line. There is a splendid performance by Dylan Baker as one of Frank’s colleagues, an office hack who lives from one hangover to the next, barely staying afloat in the cubicled environment of big office anonymity. We can only applaud the Wheelers for wanting out, for daring, even if just for a moment, to resist the kind of robotic existence that is uncomfortably akin to something out of The Stepford Wives (the 1974 original rather than the 2004 remake). But the Wheelers are far from being anti-establishment heroes. Their belief that they are special derives as much from self-love and vanity as any virtue of character or talent. The fact that these very ordinary people are played by two of the dream factory’s best known faces, who also link back to the romantic fairy tale of Titanic (1997), sets up a jangling disharmony in the background that is almost like a second sound track, opening up interpretations about what it is to have dreams, to be special, to be yourself. In an age in which we are brought up to believe in our own special and unique individuality, this can be decidedly uncomfortable and makes Revolutionary Road something of a parable for modern times.
DiCaprio is brilliantly cast as Frank, inhabiting a region between the pretty boy of Titanic, hope and romance still alive in his face, and the coarse, bejowled features of the corporate bosses Frank pretends to despise. His somewhat wooden delivery fits a character who doesn’t really know who he is, and seems to be constantly aping something or someone else. Frank Wheeler is a composite of the establishment and the ideas espoused by the beatnik movement, but he is neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. Winslet, as April, adopts a style that out-Streeps Meryl in even her iciest roles as she transforms from an admirable woman who takes her dreams seriously to someone who won’t let go, tearing herself and her family apart, neither bold enough to set out on her own, nor resigned enough to settle for something less. We want to sympathize with her, but stubbornness turns to bitterness and then something close to madness, and at the extremity of her torment, she almost succeeds in alienating herself from any possibility of sympathy. This is a role that cements Winslet as very much more than a decorative presence in cinema.
Mendes’ presentation is extremely stagy, as is the dialogue, and only needs a proscenium to fully disengage the audience from the action. The atmosphere of the film has something of the autopsy table about it; as we look down on how the relationship between the Wheelers died, our minds are half on the mortality of our own loves and dreams, rather than engrossed in their plight.
The part of John Givings (Michael Shannon), a mathematician on leave from a mental institution, who serves the function of a holy fool, speaking the truth in the guise of madness, is a little too self-consciously deployed as a device to underline the contradictions that tear the Wheelers apart. But then, Mendes has never been light-handed in his treatments, and in Revolutionary Road, the same lack of subtlety that marked both American Beauty (1999) and Jarhead (2005) slightly diminishes the film. Nevertheless, the strong script, which is not without its humorous moments, largely overcomes both the bleak story and disengaged presentation to make for an excellent and thoughtful two hours in the cinema.
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