Movie Review: Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road opens its story just after the conclusion of a disastrous community theatre production of The Petrified Forest where, on a small, suburban public school stage, April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) has suffered more than just humiliation, her self image as a unique individual with a special place in the world has been destroyed. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), obviously tired of April’s latest attempt at self-actualization, isn’t exactly sympathetic. The argument that follows is bitter, the film that follows is probably worse than that play.

What say we don’t argue over whether or not the suburbs, especially the suburbs of the 1950s, are killers of the human spirit. To each their own, right? But does anyone really want to defend that portraying the suburbs as such hasn’t become the most tiring of tiring cliches? Almost as tiring as the mentally unbalanced character with a unique, penetrating insight into the human condition … which Revolutionary Road also employs.

Years ago, when April and Frank first met, they were not yet twenty-five, had their whole lives ahead of them and were positive they were special. She was studying to be an actress and he was a longshoreman dreaming of a life lived in Paris. Like all of us, things didn’t quite turn out as planned. For instance, I don’t drive a choo choo train and go home to a fur bikini holding Raquel Welch. The difference between by myself and the Wheelers, though, is that I grew up.

April resents Frank because instead of becoming the man who took her to Paris, he became the man who knocked her up, married her, and settled for a cubicle he loathes on the 15th floor of a big corporation. While he pushes papers, dictates memos, and seduces a pixie from the secretarial pool, she ties on an apron and quietly suffers the boredom smothering her under the sterile conformity of her suburban life and neighborhood.

At the end of her rope, April convinces Frank that with their savings and the equity in their home they can still live the dream. Sell everything, quit the job, pack up the two kids, and move to Paris. Her plan is to support him with a lucrative secretarial job she’s sure is low-hanging fruit while he uses the time to, uhm, well… And that’s part of the problem. When Frank met April he had no idea what he would do in Paris, and he still doesn’t. Frank has no artistic aspirations, but he does hate his job and so he agrees.

Obviously, the plan is doomed to unravel and while it does, so does the marriage. Frank comes to his senses after a nice promotion comes his way and the reality of the pointlessness of the move takes hold. April, on the other hand, is insane. She has no talent, no goals, no idea what she wants, just the certainty that she’s destined for something better than a cookie-cutter neighborhood and that she’s superior to her cookie-cutter neighbors.

The film’s biggest problem is that it is impossible to give even a hint of a damn about these two contemptible human beings. Young, healthy, employed… They live in a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood and are blessed with two lovely, healthy children. Regardless of what director Sam Mendes might have had in mind, his characters aren’t suffocated by the American suburbs, they’re suffering under the realization that the world has declared its verdict that they are ordinary.

In equal parts, the film is at once the studied, somber, quiet autopsy of a marriage made in narcissism with slow, perfectly framed tracking shots set to Thomas Newman’s sparse score (more of that one finger piano plunking) in-between bursts of histrionics where both parties scream pretentious exposition at one another. Kate Winslet is awful. There isn’t a single real moment during any of it. The way she sits, how she carries herself, the way her eyes move — everything is considered and deliberate.

To be fair, DiCaprio has a few excellent moments, maybe the best of his career. As she backs him up wielding every psycho tool in the psycho wife’s handbook, he has a few memorably, powerful moments where his confusion and anguish is very real. Unfortunately, the overwrought dialogue sinks most of his performance, but the only believable moments of the film occur when he’s able to relate how it feels to be tortured by someone you love for leaving them behind as you learn to count your blessings.

Revolutionary Road is more of that contemporary Oscar-bait too sterile and self-important to deal with the real complications of humanity. Other than being a fly on the wall of neurotic melodrama, there’s nothing to take away from the story. Where’s the filmmaker’s courage to turn his source material into something meaningful? With American Beauty, a film I respect, Mendes made an impressive debut exploring the same theme of suburban suffering, but there was at least a real joy in Lester Burnham’s crisis of middle age and a final realization on his part, though it came too late, that appreciating what you have is much more rewarding than chasing what you don’t.

Revolutionary Road just lies there, a dead thing that like its main characters gives off a sense of entitlement about its own preciousness but without doing the heavy lifting required to earn it. Like April Wheeler, Mendes doesn’t care that his film has no worth. He’s saying, I look good, I’m me, I’m special, recognize. But the only thing special is believing anyone but wealthy, healthy narcissists will care about the trials and tribulations of wealthy, healthy narcissists.