Richard Yates’ 1961 novel about a young couple staring into the abyss of the American Dream myth provides director Sam Mendes with plenty of emotional ammunition to fuel a gorgeous but devastating drama.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are perfectly cast as Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple with two kids and a dream of abandoning their cookie-cutter suburban lifestyle for a new start in Paris.
Everyday, 30-year-old Frank commutes into Manhattan from their ideal split-level home in Connecticut while April keeps house. Both are smart and articulate enough to see the dead-end before them, but April has a sharper sense of the immediacy of their plight.
Michael Shannon pulls off a high-wire supporting actor performance as John Givings, a mentally indigent visitor who all too accurately assesses the couple’s problems during his brief weekend visits to their home. This is an intense social drama that barley lets the audience catch their breath. DiCaprio and Winslet give stunning performances that resonate long after the movie is over. There will be tears.
The 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy torpedoed America’s starry-eyed fantasy of suburban homogeneity that had been fueled in part by Senator Joe McCarthy’s 10-year run of fear-mongering that helped fuel the Cold War and led to the House on Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt.
Set in 1955, Frank has abandoned the bohemian lifestyle that introduced him to April, a fresh-faced intellectual with a romantic soft spot. An exquisite flashback party scene shows Frank’s effortless charm and knack for seduction that wins over the woman who will later offer him a last chance at escape from a trap he can barely fathom.
These days Frank whiles away his life at a soul-numbing desk job for a machine-producing company that doesn’t scratch the surface of his potential so much as it more than pays the bills. On his 30th birthday Frank indulges in an afternoon tryst with a full-figured girl (Zoe Kazan) from his secretary pool. DiCaprio dynamically demonstrates Frank’s impatience leading up to the adulterous encounter and his consequent dissatisfaction with the girl. It’s an end run experiment that goes ever-so-slightly wrong. When Frank later admits the indiscretion to April, she pointedly asks him why he told her.
As he grapples for an answer, we witness Frank’s utter confusion and desperation that infects her with an emotional virus that moves like quicksilver through her physiology. The emotionally loaded scene is one of many such cataclysmic intimate events that explode with a fury and passion that is mesmerizing for its range of pent-up disappointment.
“Revolutionary Road” is a rear mirror parable of cultural dissatisfaction that questions “the good life” and America’s reliance on social mores to define our identity. April and Frank see the problem before them and they are able agree on a solution. The couple makes public their plan to move to Paris where April will support the family while Frank follows his artistic calling—whatever unpredictable form that may take. The disclosure meets with uniform contempt from neighbors and co-workers whose underestimated influence will act with subversive accuracy.
We are swept up in the couple’s idealism that rejects America’s formulaic system in favor of foreign liberation. A question about the true nature of freedom nags and bites at their relationship in way that enables the audience to participate in the thought process as it develops. Justin Haythe’s (“The Clearing”) expressive adaptation of Richard Yates’s novel endows the material with an economy that allows space for the actors to expand on their characters’ constricting consciousness.
British-born director Sam Mendes has only made three films since “American Beauty” (1999). “Road to Perdition” (2002) and “Jarhead” (2005) offer transparent crucibles of American historical attitudes toward violence. The antagonism in “Revolutionary Road” stems directly from a relationship made unsustainable by objectively attractive social conditions.
The suburban protectionism and perfection that Frank and April engage in is enchanting on the surface but disfigures their personalities to an unrecognizable state of sterility. Frank’s imagination is the first to collapse and drags April down with it as he accuses her of the defects he feels in himself.
The American Dream was a MacGuffin to enable a corporate restructuring of the world’s landscape beyond the paltry grasp of its citizens. The freedom that Frank and April imagined in 1955 is under far more pressure today than it was then, but conformity is still the last word.
Rated R. 119 mins.
