Revolutionary Road (***½)

Directed by: Sam Mendes
Starring: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates
Seen: January 25th 2009

***½ Out of ****

“Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.”

So says John Givings (Shannon), a mentally ill character in Revolutionary Road, and probably the truest voice in the entire film, the metaphor that those who really want more in life than the American Dream does not fall within “sane” society’s limits. Who could want more than the American Dream? Who could not be happy with simply settling down into the life of the working class? Mom, dad, and two-and-a-half kids; as they say.

Frank (DiCaprio) is a young dreamer with no idea what he really wants to become in life and April (Winslet) is a young actress dreaming of bigger things without the acting skills to match. It seems the two are a very happy couple at the start of the film, but it starts spiralling so soon you forget they were ever happy in their relationship as the drive home from a stage-play of April’s turns into verbal abuse by the side of the road.

Frank hates his marketing job at the company where his dad slaved away for 20 years, and April is also not the happiest of housewives, but still the veneer holds up when their neighbours come around, they are a perfect suburban couple. April learns that secretaries in France gets paid top dollar, and comes to Frank with the idea of moving to Paris, starting over. She’ll support the family until Frank figures out what he really wants in life. And, for a brief moment, they are a happy couple again, dreaming of going large, not letting the establishment get them down, sticking it to the man.

But in an attempt to sabotage his job, Frank actually does something right and gets offered a promotion, and since he thinks of staying things start crumbling around them again. And the two revolutionaries who live on Revolutionary Road are everything but that as things start deteriorating at an ever increasing rate.

DiCaprio and Winslet are together again, but this is as far from Titanic as the two can get, and it works beautifully as Mendes, Winslet’s husband, pulls great performances from the two. We are left behind with a sad realisation though, life is hard, and even when you have no apparent reason to be unhappy, lost dreams can shatter outward appearances.