Humid with a high chance of rain

Rating: Null/10 (29 January 2010)

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is a challenging work, in that it is based on a novel written by author Richard Yates back in the early 1960s. It is interesting that the film version appears now. The movie is intriguing and worthy, almost a poetic exposition of some of the sociological observations of the late C. Wright Mills, so it's not an easy cruise. But it's very good, a bold piece from director Sam Mendes.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett are Frank and April Wheeler, an upper middle class Long Island couple whose marriage has gone sour as the dreams of a life in the arts or pursuit of life of mind have succumbed to the career realities of mortgage payments, children and upper class mobility. The setting is a relatively prosperous Long Island suburb during the 1950s.
Frank Wheeler is a junior level executive for a business machine company, and spends many of his lunch hours drinking and commiserating with friends. The tension between he and April leads him to dalliances with secretaries, and the audience is witness to a manipulative trist he has with a 19 year old receptionist who falls under his "charm". April spends most of her days caught in the domestic trap that all too many women knew in the mid-1950s, housework and daydreaming about days gone by. At the beginning of the film, we see her performing in a community theater play that is poorly received by the audience, and she remains frustrated by the abandonment of her theater dreams.
Bored and alienated by middle class suburbia and the quiet presumption imposed by neighbors caught in a similar bind, Frank and April decide they're going to sell the house and move their lives with their two children over to France. And, as fate would have it, this dream emerges at the exact same time that the company Frank works for decides that he's a bright new idea man, and offers him a big promotion. Frank is now caught between his undefined personal dreams and the possibilities of real material advancement. April, who knows desperately that she wants something much different then the life of a suburban housewife, but, who like most women of that era, rarely is allowed time or space to develop her ideas about who she is, clings wildly to the escape plan. Frank is a stormy individual caught in the casual lies most men from the professional classes in that era were bought into, and he frequently takes advantage of the enhanced isolation that is driving April nuts through engaging in abusive tirades.
The film becomes deep tragedy over an unwanted pregnancy before its end, but along the way, some rather penetrating commentary on the Wheeler's situation by the son of a neighbor who has been struggling with mental illness lights up the Wheeler's reality better than either of the protagonists can, burdened as they are by the deceptions of careerism, extramarital dalliances, and parenting roles that neither of them really seem to want. The atmosphere of the piece, then, is like a high summer day on Long Island, humid with a high chance of rain. The viewer knows that some sort of cloudburst is going to come, and there's not much surprise when one of life's lethal downpours arrives and reshapes the lives of the central characters. All the same, Winslett and DiCaprio and their supporting cast carry this difficult piece quite ably. REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is a keeper.