Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I wonder how many moviegoers will see Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the poster for Revolutionary Road and enter the theater anticipating a replay of their roles in Titanic. Those audiences are in for a shock, though less so if they have any familiarity with the prior work of director Sam Mendes. Personally, I always thought American Beauty was a drastically overrated film, and that made me a little skeptical about this one, since its subject matter revisits some of that same terrain in a different time period. (I haven't read the Richard Yates novel that the film is based on, but most of the reviews suggest it's even bleaker and more uncompromising.) But that skepticism was unwarranted. Mendes has created a genuine masterpiece here, a movie that revitalizes the old cliché of suburbia as a soul-crushing world of shattered dreams and illusory happiness by virtue of its emotional intensity and a perfect marriage of directorial vision and subject matter. That vision is unsparingly bleak and cruel, but that's part of what makes Revolutionary Road so successful-- there are no Hollywood happy endings here, just two flawed yet sympathetic people struggling with the limitations of their existence and the strain it's placed on their relationship.

It's 1955, and Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) are living an outwardly "normal" but inwardly miserable existence in suburban Connecticut. He's unhappily employed at the same company where his father worked, barely distinguishable from all of the other grey-suited corporate drones around him; she's haunted by her former aspirations of becoming an actress (one early scene, focused on her performance in a mediocre local theater production, is especially poignant) and by the dream she and Frank once shared of living in Paris. In many respects, they're as shallow as the wannabe bohemians Woody Allen depicted in Vicki Cristina Barcelona, only they engage our sense of empathy and identification in a way those characters never accomplished. Who can't identify with feeling some sense of being above all the ordinary, mediocre people and having some kind of special destiny? And both Frank and April are so recognizably human, so contradictory and conflicted in their desires, that it's hard not to feel for them as their dream of escaping suburban conformity slowly falls apart.

This is in large part due to the extraordinary performances of both leads. I don't think I've ever seen DiCaprio give a better performance, and it's one that goes against expectations. Frank Wheeler is, for much of the film's running time, a horribly nasty and insenstive a*****e: he cheats on his wife without so much as a second thought, maintains a contemptuous aloofness towards his colleagues at work, and is just petty, selfish, and cruel in general. And yet DiCaprio conveys not only the depths of his brutality, but also the kind-hearted and generous qualities that have been ground down by years of living in a mind-numbing conformist existence. Winslet's performance is even better, because she has a far more difficult challenge: portraying an angry, frustrated woman struggling with society's views of her proper place in the world, essentially a feminist before her time, but one who ultimately has to conform to preserve the illusion of peace in her household. The role requires her to veer from passionate rage to genuine warmth to placid, false amiability, and Winslet does it all magnificently, creating a coherent character out of what could have become a disjointed mess. The fact that both actors were overlooked in the Oscar nominations is nothing short of criminal; these are the best performances I've seen in any movie in years, much less just this past year.

I've read a number of reviews that criticize Mendes' direction for being too detached and distant, but I felt it was perfectly suited to the material. The Wheelers are trapped in a cold, monotonous way of life, so why shouldn't the look of the film reflect that? Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins make the Wheelers' home as bright and perfectly groomed as possible, conveying the distance between the illusion of suburban happiness and the harsher realities of their relationship; they show the emptiness of Frank's working life through the tidal waves of men in slate grey suits at the train station and the endless identical cubicles in the office, and the camera's cold, unblinking gaze renders the film's deeper emotional undercurrents all the more painful. Besides, I don't recall anyone criticizing Stanley Kubrick for being too detached, and what Mendes accomplishes here reminds me of Kubrick in his prime, only with more emphasis on the tragic than the satirical.

The film does have a few missteps. It falls into the cliché of presenting a mentally ill person as the voice of truth (presumably, this comes intact from Yates' book, but it's still overly familar), though this weakness is diminished by Michael Shannon's superb performance in that role. The ending is also a bit rushed and perfunctory, especially given the severity of the events that immediately precede it. But on the whole, this is an exceptionally good film, and its failure to receive a Best Picture nomination just shows how out of touch the Oscars are with reality.