Revolutionary Road

Synopsis: April and Frank Wheeler ( Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) are a young couple in 1950s Connecticut who are feeling that suburban conformity is sapping their once brightly-burning young lives. At April’s instigation they decide to throw off the shackles and move to Paris but if the best laid plans oft gang aglay what chance does one as woolly as this have?

Revolutionary Road, a powerful melodrama in the Sirkian tradition amply demonstrates how far Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet have come since their Titanic (1997) days, both as individuals and performers.  Whilst the subject matter is a trenchant look at the relationship between April and Frank it is in many ways also a showcase for the pair’s acting skills and is rewarding in both aspects..    

Directed by Winslet's then-husband, Sam Mendes, the screenplay by Justin Haythe was adapted from a novel by Richard Yates, although with its concentrated intensity it might well have started life as a stage play. Mendes had already explored suburban angst to great success with the much-hyped American Beauty (1999) but Revolutionary Road is a much more concentrated and satisfying affair. The intensity no doubt comes from the novel by Yates which was published in 1961, not too distant from the date in which the story is set (1955) and one might reasonably presume, based on first-hand experience. Over and above critical perspective on the period however, the film deals with a theme just as pertinent to audiences today - the never-ending battle between individual self-assertion and self-preserving conformity that everyone must face. The success of the film is that the latter aspect, the battle to be true to oneself, is more prominent that the socio-historical critique, the excellent period production design notwithstanding.

The casting of Winslet and DiCaprio is particularly effective here as they bring a certain contemporaneity to what might otherwise have been simply a critical period piece like Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956).  Mendes doesn’t freight the drama with a lot of realistic detail – Frank and April’s children are barely seen and Frank’s office affair mainly occurs off-screen, the film staying focused on the two principals who individually and together make their characters movingly palpable. Kathy Bates gives a wonderful performance as a typical busybody matron of the era however Michael Shannon as her son is less effective. Not that that is Shannon’s fault – his role as written is rather awkward making him an unduly too-obvious mouthpiece of ideas already well-exemplified in the main action. Thomas Newman's score and Roger Deakins' cinematography add to the overall success  of the production.

Despite its historical setting, the light Revolutionary Road holds up to what the existentialists called bad faith and is a relevant today as it was to the arch-conformist '50s.

 

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