This is a movie about a young couple with a nice house, plenty to eat, two healthy children, a solid source of income, and a sense of hopeless despair. Frankly, upon watching it, I wanted to slap both of them in the face. Only in American cinema are people so self-obsessed that they think they can make a whiny, melodramatic film like this and believe an audience would sympathize with their pathos.
Sam Mendes has made a career attempting to tap into that suburban sense of anxiety that most people who have rigidly followed the American dream sooner or later experience. "American Beauty" (which was essentially a gutless rip-off of "Fight Club") did the same, and with "Revolutionary Road" Mendes goes even farther away from the "Fight Club" blueprint he should be following.
The film begins with Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) watching his wife April (Kate Winslet) at a play. It's clear that the play is awful, and although Frank tries to comfort his wife about it afterwards, he does so in a way that is callous and insulting. The Wheelers end up in a massive fight and it soon becomes apparent that there are issues at work beyond Frank's response to April's failed theater debut. An interesting thing about the opening scene is that, as the film progresses and you learn more about April, you find yourself reassessing it and realizing how April contributed to the explosion. Frank consistently says the wrong thing but April doesn't say anything at all. Both of the Wheelers feel they are beyond reproach, yet both of them intentionally antagonize the other by carefully and deliberately pushing the sensitive little buttons that married couples are unable to keep hidden from one another forever.
April gets the idea that it's their boring suburban surroundings that are destroying them and that they should sell their house, Frank should quit his job, and they should move to France. This is a romantic idea and Frank initially gets excited about it even though all of their friends think they're being absurdly immature. While the Wheelers are planning the move, they go through a period in which they are extremely happy, buoyed by the dream that they are finally "getting out." This happiness phase leads to April getting pregnant and Frank getting offered a promotion and the trip to France, inevitably, gets put on the back burner.
"Revolutionary Road" is one of those films that seems tailor made for Academy Award recognition. The actors are Academy darlings, and the screenplay has a lot of places for people to scream and cry at the same time. "Revolutionary Road" does succeed in making you feel something. The "happy breakfast" scene at the end of the film is about the cruelest thing I've ever seen one human being do to another on screen. I'm not going to say much more about it for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but I do find it disgusting that our society screams and moans about the dangers of graphic violence in films, but when one person is emotionally cruel to another, you never hear a peep. In fact, if it's a female torturing a man, this emotional cruelty might even be celebrated.
"Revolutionary Road" is a work along the lines of "Madame Bovary" or "The Awakening." It is a story about two people who immediately embrace despair at the first sign of hardship. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that you've got to roll with the punches and that half the time when you don't get something you want you end up with something else that is fifty times better than you ever could have imagined. I suppose it's tempting to leave the theater with the thought that the Wheelers might have made it if they had gone to France. However, that thought is absurd as well. Don't you think they would have encountered hardships in France? Wouldn't they have had financial problems, problems with the language, problems with the culture? The problem with the Wheelers is that they have incorrectly assessed their issues. It's not where they are that's the problem, but how they interact. They both need to mature, but since neither of them cares to see that, they decide to blame the neighborhood.
I'm curious to hear how audiences respond to April. Back when I was in college, I was amazed how students could have positive impressions of characters such as Madame Bovary and Edna Pontellier; characters who cheat on their husbands, abandon their children, and succumb to a largely invented misery. These characters do represent real life personality types, but their actions are unfortunate rather than heroic and should be labeled as such. You've got to trust your feelings, but at the same time, you've got to hold them in check; especially when they are driving you to the brink.
