while all of us get better at lying (to ourselves), it remains impossible (for some) to forget the truth

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2008)

What happens if/when you look in a mirror and can't begin to admit that you don't really like what you see?
Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is a relentlessly bleak and compelling experience that can't be called an "entertainment," but it's powerfully disturbing in ways that *art* can sustain, where "conversations" tend to die sudden deaths.
The Wheeler's are a 1950s married couple, complete with two kids and a house in the "cozy" CT burbs; but, like most of the repressed denizens of that day, they are failing at the "Ozzie&Harriet"(TM) life, where 1+1 is supposed to =1 ("his" one).
This house turns out not to be much of a home.
Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslett) are wholly disconnected and miserably incomplete. (The bedding on the sofa that April tends to in the first scene of her daily domestic "bliss" telegraphs that they haven't been sleeping together and not even in the same room.)
The two came together at a Bohemian "Village" party shortly after the close of WW2. Frank was an infantry veteran of the ETO, but remains a boy-man, floating from job-to-job and possessed with a "charming" frankness about himself. His only real ambition, besides not winding up like his Old Man, is to make his aimless, male prerogative bachelor ends meet. April was an aspiring actress with mildly diva-ish pretensions. April considers herself "special," superior to the herds of lemming-like '50s conformity. She thinks she sees in Frank the most interesting man she's ever met and extrapolates that to also mean a kindred spirit. What Frank sees in April is the most stunning woman at the party who's willing to enter into his conversational orbit. It's a match filled with both promise and peril.
Bun in the oven, the two marry and assemble the customary pieces of life needed to Play House, still fueled by a young and otherwise untested love. As they travel down a road of material practicality, though, safety becomes conformity and deep disenchantment. Whatever "special"-ness they might've thought they shared got lost along the way.
Frank and April become almost exactly like all of the other suburban drones that they once considered themselves to be vastly superior to. April, as it turns out, might not be an actress, after all, for all of her formal studies. Frank is an Ad Man working for the same Gray Flannel company that his Old Man once toiled for over in Sales.
April is the more desperate of the two, because her days are filled with the small trials of raising of two children in the isolated social barrenness of a not-quite-arrived suburbia. The kids rarely turn to Frank when he's home. Frank has the daily diversions of his commute into NYC, the shallow banter of his co-worker AdMan flacks and the distractions of the secretarial pool. April feels trapped. Frank is feeling 30. Each seems to have only the other to blame for their predicament.
None of the "others," who also inhabit this story, who don't openly aspire to April's personal sense of "specialness," are altogether pleased with their own lives, either, but they repeatedly choose resignation.
This is a time when women were routinely *diagnosed* as being "hysterical" (as if it were a XX-chromosomal disease) and social non-conformists sentenced to "funny farms" and electro-shock "therapy." Nothing at all wrong with Society, so all problems have to be individual. All of these details serve to illustrate the hairline fissures in custom and culture that would erupt in the decades to follow.
Frank and April each embark on their own extra marital affair. And, even in that, April's options prove to be more desperate and less superficially gratifying than Frank's. (Think three-minute wonders here, and April's refusal to even pretend that Shep has anything to do with "love.")
...
Do any of us know even one couple, today, that's in the grips of a Wheeler-ish predicament?
Have any of us ever bellowed, or muttered, any of the caustic lines in the film toward anyone that we claim to positively care about?
Does any husband, today, turn up his iPod in order to tune out his wife and/or the kids?
Which is worse? An act of martial infidelity or all of the tiny little deaths/failings in a committed relationship that come before?
Even if women truly have more personal/individual choices available to them, today, than they did in the 1950s, don't almost all of these come with additional burdens, stemming from perniciously persistent gender roles that have more to do with sociology than biology?
When women, in particular, are made to suffer, are men immune to any/all collateral damage?
These and other questions raised by this film make it either a riveting watch or completely obtuse.
There's no way to see RR and remain unmoved.
I praise the terrific acting of Winslett, DiCaprio and Shannon (as the lone, sanely astute commentator in this brutally tragic story). I also credit Mendes for his direction and Haythe's screenplay adaptation of the Yates' novel, despite the role of Frank being so internally pared down.
This is a very tough film to have a shallow conversation about, because it is whithering social commentary, none of which is safely buried 53 years in *our* past. The contradictions depicted in the film are very much alive today, dressed with more modern veneers, as we face a real possibility of entering into a Great Depression II of our own collective making and *continue* to question a woman's right to reproductive choices.
This isn't the best film of this year, in my book; but it's a must see and quite possibly a litmus test for where we are in our own lives today.