Winslet And Dicaprio Wage War With One Another Every Second of the Way Through

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2009)

Without the great presence of Dicaprio and Winslet this film would seriously be at the level of a TV movie. Revolutionary Road is a film that certainly will not cheer you up. It is about a husband and wife who make an attempt at escaping there their "empty and hopeless" life. Or at least they create the delusion that they will.
In this film Winslet and Dicaprio are at the top of their games. Their feelings toward each other are complex and deranged. Their bitterness towards each other seems to disappear as the movie wears on but it does not. They simply put the bitterness they feel for each other in the back of their mind thinking it will go away and it may have. But when one key event takes place in the movie their bitterness evolves into hatred. Instead of continuing to fight the lie of what people think it means to lead a good life, which is what drew them to each other in the first place, they start to accept that lie causing them to drift apart in so many ways. Dicaprio and Winslet are one of the few that are able to so perfectly illustrate complexities such as this in relationships and marriage. Michael Shannon plays a very interesting role of a man considered crazy yet is the only one who agrees with the "emptyness and hopelessness" of their lives. He plays well but I feel as if something is missing from his character.
The directing of Sam Mendes is good in that the film brings you back in time. Yet the movie did not rise to what it could have been because of the writing. The film did not open up enough to fully capture the audience. The film stayed one gear and never seemed to switch off it. The couple of Winslet and Dicaprio seemed to be happy at one point but we barely get a glimpse of that. If the movie had started off on that and then switched over to its false hope and then depressing tone it would have greatly succeeded. Instead the movie becomes overly depressing and cynical not living up to its potential.