The Road to Disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (30 November 2008)

How are you going to keep the viewers down in the theaters now that they've seen Mad Men? With pedigree maybe, but maybe not.
Revolutionary Road would have had something new to say two years ago, just before the AMC television series hit the cablewaves. Today, it just feels like we've seen it all before, and much better. Only this time it's said by stars, big stars, three of them reuniting from the one of the biggest movies of all time, throwing their acting around like they're auditioning for Oscar himself. But does that a good film make?
The story of the proverbial "folks who live on the hill", whose lives turn out to be much darker than any of their friends and neighbors would imagine, offered many opportunities for departure from past films and television shows. But this new Sam Mendes film does not take advantage of those opportunities and plunges instead down a path of self-destructive discontent that's too much of a predictable standard to feel revolutionary at all.
To make matters worse, this road is loaded with clichÃ©s about suburbia, the emptiness of middle-class existence, and the loss of dreams and individuality, all wrapped in the same smoke-booze-and-infidelity excesses as its more sophisticated television sibling.
Leonardo Di Caprio replays the same character we've come accustomed to seeing in his hands, all lava-like intensity and pain behind his child-like face. For my money, he gives an adequate but mostly unmodulated performance that is all tears ready to burst out of his eyes with every marital twist of fate. Weren't those mad men in the 1950's the ultimate experts at keeping it all in? Kate Winslet doesn't fare much better or much worse. But Michael Shannon, in a well-written part, gives the one performance that should be remembered at Oscar time.
Not the best from the director of the impeccable American Beauty. A 6.5 out of 10.