The "american nightmare" : REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

Rating: 9/10 (1 October 2009)

A dream interrupted abruptly before dawn. Hopes that the long-awaited break in the daily conventionality of a 'life miserable, sleepy, unsatisfied. Ten years on from 'American Beauty', Sam Mendes has again a picture of family and its subsequent disintegration filtered through an apparent normality of the facade, which actually hides concerns and falsehood. Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler are a couple middle-class New York in the Fifties, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an employee, April (Kate Winslet) an aspiring actress. The couple lives with two sons in a comfortable residential dwellings. Their frustrations are as crazy splintered and in fact, at the earliest sequences are seeing anything but edifying skirmishes that follow one another seamlessly. From the novel by Richard Yates 'Revolutionary Road' is an intimate and thorough investigation of the couple's relationship, set in a context, the fifties, so conformist as to be cloying and fake and plastic. Anxieties and fears of a young couple are well masked by a layer of total hypocrisy. The individual aspirations are unattainable goals victims of unavoidable constraints: one can not be what you are. We are allowed to dream, but as long as you keep our feet on the ground. Because in fact this is the crux of the film, where there is division between good and evil, victim and executioner, the only 'guilt' which is attributed to Frank and April is only that he believed it possible to materialize their dreams. For a moment. Endless moment. The American dream does not exist because it never existed, is simply unattainable utopia. Circumvent stereotypes, Sam Mendes enters with skill in the folds of American society, showing a disarming realism and 'objectivity disconcerting: the filmmaker happens to be English, but America knows more of an American himself. And among wild trails, pettiness irrelevant (he who betrays an 'insipid secretary, she is totally indifferent to the news because now no love for him) nothing is what it seems, where even sex is an outlet, a foothold to cling with the aim only to externalize their inner frustrations and drive: eloquent in this case the scene of intercourse in the car. A world where a boy with mental problems (the good Michael Shannon, Oscar nominated) and even the most lucid of all, the only voice out from the pack, but note the fact, fits with sincerity perspective through this sentence: "It takes the liver to see the void, but It takes a lot more to see that there is hope." 'Revolutionary Road' is a film slow and introspective, the time taken, in which everything is determined with extreme precision, photography and soundtrack to contribute effectively to the performance of individual sequences, especially the last, shocking and inevitable, in which the emotional tension explodes in a paroxysm becoming almost unbearable. Leonardo DiCaprio is very good, but Kate Winslet is amazing: so real, tangible. Gives the best interpretation of his career identifying himself with monstrous emotion: his every subtle gesture is thus a demonstration of impressive physicality. Commendable. A vision in the original language in this case and for a film focused primarily on the dialogues is almost necessary. 'Revolutionary Road' is a film disillusioned, gloomy, dreary, weary because so truthful and current, the Fifties serve as a perfect disguise of contemporaneity. You can live without dreaming, resigned to a life of mediocrity common and routine, if you do not need to change the city is still dead inside, do not need to have children and raised over then condemned to unhappiness. We Open the eyes then, a new day is looming. And the harsh realities of life to annihilate us.