Strong performances let down by weak narrative spine

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2009)

Many people have said that Sam Mendes' latest forage into dark American suburbia in Revolutionary Road is how Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet's characters from Titanic would be like had they have married in that film and Jack Dawson not met his effusive watery grave.
The film explores, from the very start, a broken relationship between the two brought on by banal life on the quiet Connecticut Revolutionary Road and both of them leaving behind the idealistic dreams of youth with DiCaprio's Frank Wheeler in an uninspiring sales job and Winslet's April Wheeler locked into the position of a housewife, briefly flirting with the world of theatre.
It is perhaps fitting that the opening scenes, culminating in a blazing row on an interstate roadside between the two, come after April feels she has failed in an amateur theatrical production. The movie feels like it has been adapted from a stage play rather than Richard Yates' novel with bulleted delineated locations and intense dialogue.
But it is the smouldering argumentative scenes between the Wheeler's that perhaps lead to a lack of fulfilment from the movie. While the feel is very Ingmar Bergman-esquire with gloomy and dark emotions bubbling under the surface, the movie does not portray the wider framework of the marriage strongly enough to carry these off.
The focal point of the film comes when April seizes on a former conversation between the two when Frank describes Paris in passionate terms, discussing his presence there in the World War II. In an attempt to reignite their lives, April suggests they set about moving to the European city so Frank can discover his true calling in life.
This provides an interesting pathway and allows the story to grow through the reactions of Frank's colleagues, a couple they're friends with, their former estate agent (Kathy Bates in her element as an interfering matriarch) and the Wheeler's two children.
It may come as a surprise that I had not referred to the children previously, especially as they fuel the destruction in Frank and April's marriage with Frank questioning whether April actually loves her children at all. The children themselves barely feature, merely used as plot tools to bring the narrative forward. This would not be such a problem but without any form of internal narration from either of them the sense of the true relationship between April and her kids is unclear and makes this aspect feel isolated.
The cold hard realities of the failing marriage are spotted by the estate agent's son, a mentally unstable man temporarily allowed out of an asylum, a notable performance from Michael Shannon, who frankly and with spite notices the hypocrisies and deterioration within the Wheelers romance.
The film uses set-pieces and the supporting cast to attempt to heighten the magnitude of admittedly bravely performed sequences between DiCaprio and Winslet, eventually reaching an engaging, though predictable, climax. While the movie is certainly not revolutionary in terms of its portrayal of a declining marriage (the television series Mad Men set in a similar suburban setting does this with much more care and intricacy), it is a solid piece of work from Mendes but cannot approach his seminal American Beauty. However, one is left longing for a greater insight into why and how the relationship has reached this point to provide much needed groundwork to the frequent marital disputes.