Revolutionary Road (***1/4)

Ah, the suburbs, the fertile playgrounds of wholesome family life. Or, maybe, a stifling social desert of conformity where dreams go to die. That’s one difference between mainstream and indie sensibility. Revolutionary Road, not to be confused with Reservation Road, obviously leans to the latter. Titanic lovers Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite, mostly unhappily, as the strivers of Richard Yates’s novel, published in 1961, when the critique of the suburbs as sterile had only begun to gel. (Surely, if Sinclair Lewis had written 1920’s Main Street a few decades later, he’d have set it in a bedroom community, not a small town.)

Yates means the suburbs as a stand-in for the worst aspects of postwar America as a whole, and Winslet’s character, April Wheeler, as a tragic heroine. Screenwriter Justin Haythe and director Sam Mendes hew close to Yates’s plot, though it’s less clear that they share April’s anti-conformist sensibility. She can instead be seen as an unhappy woman who pushes her office-worker husband, Frank, to be someone he’s not as a substitute for her own failed ambitions. (In the opening, she’s an actress in a bad local theater production.) Her desire—which she persuades Frank to share—to escape her Connecticut suburb can seem desperate, the location only symbolic.

And yet Winslet synthesizes this volatile woman so that she seems comprehensible, though not necessarily to her husband. Director Mendes is on familiar ground, having directed American Beauty, to which Yate’s novel has been compared. There, it was the husband who rebels against conformity, and his wife who has the affair. (Frank, disregarding cliché, seduces his new secretary.) Revolutionary Road is similar to American Beauty, but not as distinctive. It is equally well shot. A hall-of-mirrors-style shot of hats and suits lined up waiting for the train, and another scene where Frank and April run into the forest remaining in their development, stand out.

But there is not the arch humor, nor the quirkiness, though they may not have been to some tastes anyway. Similar, perhaps, are the not-altogether-agreeable characters, who include a mental patient whom the Wheelers reluctantly befriend. The many scenes of confrontation that form a lot of the movie have the effect of keeping them at an emotional remove. Perhaps this is intentional.

Frank is a talky character, and, indie film or not, Revolutionary Road is not quiet or effete, or especially subtle. Whether seen as a story of a mismatched couple or an existential dilemma about selling out one’s one dreams, it consistently held my interest.

IMDB link

viewed 1/5(?)/09 at Ritz East; reviewed 1/14/09