'Revolutionary Road'
MOVIE REVIEW
Strong performances steer this 1950s marital drama out of a period-picture trap.
Based on the celebrated Richard Yates novel of 1950s conformity, "Revolutionary Road" is initially as trapped in that benighted decade as its protagonists. It takes the skill of stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and director Sam Mendes to get this film to a place where it involves and moves us -- which it finally does -- but it is a near thing.
The story of a young married couple, disappointed dreamers who both wonder how their lives came to be so different than their aspirations and question whether they have the fortitude to make a change, "Revolutionary Road" finds itself hampered by factors that were so intrinsic to the original project that they couldn't be removed.
The most obvious difficulty is the era itself, the cozy but stifling 1955 New York and Connecticut world in which Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) live. It's not so much the way things looked; in fact, a Roger Deakins-lensed shot of a wave of businessmen wearing hats storming Manhattan from Grand Central Station is rather haunting. It's how they sound.
Justin Haythe's screenplay does many good things, but it can't escape the arch lingo of the time, women saying "I must scoot" and men calling each other "old sport." That kind of language can't help but come off as artificial to contemporary ears, and that in turn makes the film's concerns initially feel dated and outmoded as well.
When April and Frank first meet, they present the best, most promising versions of themselves to each other at a Manhattan party. She is a beautiful, committed actress, he has charisma to burn, and their potential future together seems especially bright.
When we pick up their lives seven years and two children later, the tone has changed. April is distraught in a community theater dressing room, aghast at the play she has just performed, and Frank has neither the care nor the capacity to empathize. Married and half-regretting it, their idea of communicating is taunting and provoking each other.
What we see at once is that both April and Frank feel suffocated by what their existence has become. Despite living on Revolutionary Road, their lives are anything but radical. She is a creative person trapped by endless housework, while his job at Knox Business Machines in the city, the firm his father worked for, so frustrates him that he has an affair with new secretary Maureen Grube (an incandescent Zoe Kazan) as much out of boredom as anything else.
