thoughtful, intense, lucid, superbly acted

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2009)

The movie is about conflicts inside marriage, about the illusions and disillusions marriage brings about, as often, in any time, but I think Revolutionary Road is much more deeper, as it penetrates into the conflicts inside human nature itself. April and Frank, after seven years of apparently happy shared life, have to come to terms not only with the real quality of their marriage, but with their personal and individual sense of frustration, being Frank a thirty-year old man, a husband and a father, who still hasn't found out what his real passion is and proves to be weak and immature, April having abandoned all her dreams to become an actress and feeling entrapped in her own perfect house. Thus becomes marriage a sort of comfortable, although painful, alibi, which allows both of them to find a reason for individual dissatisfaction outside themselves, shifting the real reasons from their inner self to some external circumstance in their life, in this case marriage lived as a burden. As a woman, I saw the whole story through April's eyes: her exterior coldness and self-control hide such terrifying anxiety and depression, overcoming her till the final choice of committing suicide. I think that her condition is still more difficult than Frank's, given her troubled and painful relation to maternity, a very delicate theme handled in the movie: when maternity is lived as a moral duty, as a solution to individual and marital conflicts, the woman is the one in the couple who suffers this condition more deeply than man, since she is torn by the love she "must" feel for the creatures she has born and the reluctance towards the condition of being a mother when she didn't feel like to, simply because not every woman is to be a mother. Wonderful acting is offered, I would say as usual, by Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet, capable of conveying true emotion, but also the whole cast deliver outstanding performances. Particularly striking is Michael Shannon playing Shep Campbell's role: he reminds me of a "Shakesperean fool", who, relying more or less uncounsciously on his mental disorder, conveys explicit but terrible explanation for Frank's and April's condition of weakness and hypocrisy, directly in front of them, a sort of inner voice of their conscience who dares say explicitly the sense of death stirring inside their family and their lives. I think the movie is absolutely worth seeing, because it gets to the real core of human nature, in a direct, intense, and extraordinarily lucid way: a movie that must make everyone think, since it confronts many questions concerning not only marriage but the complexity of human nature, with which every human being, now and then, consciously or uncounsciously, sooner or later, has to come to terms, and the result of this confrontation is, as often real life shows, not always soothing and positive.