It’s hard to ignore the Oscar polish involved in Revolutionary Road; an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, reunites the stars of the Oscar-gobbling Titanic. To that end, Mendes does his best to make the film look serious and prestigious. And if you give it a cursory glance it’s possible to come away with the impression that it is indeed a great and important film. But overall, it was grim and needlessly pointless.
Mendes keeps his tone very serious and very gray, with no humor whatsoever and lots of pauses in the awkward conversations. Normally, I like this kind of ebb and flow in films, but Mendes conducts the rhythm not as beats (up and down, with rest spaces in-between) but as dead spaces within the same dreary, constant tone. The movie provides the gray, flat cinematography, which used weather and textures to enhance the story. Then we have the performances, which, in their seriousness, will probably earn a few awards. But DiCaprio seems too baby-faced for this grown-up era, and far too aware of his performance. Winslet now seems much older than him (she’s a year younger), and their Titanic chemistry is all but gone (not that this movie was going to attract many Titanic fans anyway).
It’s puzzling to consider that Mendes tackled very similar themes in American Beauty (1999), making tons of money and winning an Oscar. But American Beauty was at the very least smart and snarky and funny with a few genuinely lovely and/or sexy moments thrown in. When Lester Burnham drops out of society, it looks like fun. And yet, at the end of the movie, it clearly conveys the same ideas conveyed here (you can’t drop out because society disapproves). Revolutionary Road fails to make the idea of dropping out either attractive or relevant. It fails to find any humor, tension or release in its situation. It fails to make this family and their friends feel plausible. The only thing it does really well is create a feeling of suffocation. Which leads to an idea: if you can’t drop out of society, you can a least find happiness by dropping out of this movie.
Synopsis:
April and Frank Wheeler are a young, thriving couple living with their two children in a Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. Their self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paying but boring office job, and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. As their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfillment are thrown into jeopardy.
