Good (but not original) premise devolves into melodrama

Rating: 6/10 (8 June 2009)

I was with this one through a good third of the film or so -- maybe even half. I'm a sucker for existential stories -- you know, stories in which one or more characters take a time-out from the sequence of events that inform and rule our daily lives and stop to consider the end game. Mendes was gold with "American Beauty." Well, I think he went to the well a few too many times with "Revolutionary Road." Yeah, it's another road. "Road to Perdition" was a road, too. Having gone down the road to perdition, did I need to take a re-run with another unhappy story in another time and setting? Not sure. Maybe. I appreciate Sam's move to bring it home (or at least a little closer) to something the average suburbanite could relate to. But the themes in Revolutionary Road have already been run through the grinder, and much more eloquently and effectively, by a writer named John Cheever. Sure, he worked in a different medium -- fiction on the page vs. cellulose -- but he got it right on the suburban malaise meter. He could have a crazy man come to an Episcopal church to crucify a rebellious teenager for the sins of the father: namely, conformity to prepackaged standards and adherence to values that seem obviously pointless. But still, when I watched the last half hour of " . . . Road," I just wasn't buying it. The flick asks us to buy into the proposition that everyone deep down knows the sick deal we've all been dealt and everyone is really, really torn up about it but almost everyone represses that understanding or whatever -- and that the unfortunate courageous few, very few, who take a look at the parameters of the human condition head-on are bound either to cower down and put on the plastic mask or are doomed to freak the heck out. Sorry, but that's ridiculous. You can take a trip to your local poor part of town (like where I've lived most of my life) and, if you have a few minutes to chat with the locals and don't get your asterisk kicked in the process, you'll find that our world is full of people who understand that the bill of goods we've been sold from day one is a piece of fecal matter. They don't go around freaking out. Newsflash -- existential despair isn't a novelty. Plenty of us have it. We don't go daydreaming about running off to Paris because of it.