Revolutionary Road: a film about Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2009)

I haven't read the book Revolutionary Road, but from the reviews I have read, it is apparently about conformity, suburban life, marriage and the search for identity in 1950's America, and the effect that the social norms of the time had on people's psyches. Revolutionary Road the film, however, seems to go beyond a story about socio-psycho-dynamics and cross over into the world of full-blown psychological disorder.
As portrayed by Kate Winslet, April Wheeler is not merely a middle-class housewife suffering from "suburban existential angst" or struggling to find her identity; she is someone afflicted with severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and through the course of the film, exhibits many of the classic traits. Here's a list of NPD traits from Wikipedia:
1. a grandiose sense of self-importance 2. a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love 3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique 4. requires excessive admiration 5. has a sense of entitlement 6. is interpersonally exploitative 7. lacks empathy 8. is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her 9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
More than just a period piece, the film Revolutionary Road can be viewed as an indictment of narcissism.
Early in the film, we see that April greatly desires to be an actress, but her acting debut is so disastrous that even she realizes that she has no talent and no future in the theater. Yet she clings to her elitist, entitled self-image as the years go by, without any apparent basis for thinking so. (Our society will tolerate pathological narcissism in our celebrities, of course, but not among the ranks of the talent-less.)
In reality, April is an isolated person with a distant, un-empathetic relationship with both her husband and her children. She can only relate to people who buy into her grandiose self-image, like her neighbors Shep and Milly Campbell. She eventually concocts a desperate, irrational plan to move to Paris to achieve something of distinction, in her mind, in order to bolster her flagging self-image.
Her husband Frank is also a narcissist, but his case is milder, lacking April's pathology. Frank is passive, and basically a lazy person; he "goes with the flow" in most of his life's dealings, including taking a boring job at the firm his dad worked at. He generally accommodates April's narcissism because it entertains him and feeds into his own vaguely-defined self-fantasy. As he goes through the motions of his life, even his affair with an office worker seems like a nonchalant diversion from ever-encroaching tedium and ennui.
A clue to April and Frank's narcissism is the furniture-like role played by their children. April and Frank are not loving parents; they're self-involved people that seem incapable of love.
Only John, the mental patient son of real estate agent Helen Givings (Kathy Bates), had the gall to expose Frank and April's delusions  to devastating effect.
Frank and April are not the only psychologically-challenged characters in the film. Helen Givings is a narcissistic and neurotic basket case (it is no wonder that her son is a mental patient), making it up as she goes along, instantly revising her history with Frank and April when it becomes necessary to maintain her own fragile self-image and hollow values.
In the final scene, we witness Helen's husband Howard's method for coping with his wife's exorbitant self-indulgence: he simply turns down his hearing aid. In this closing scene, as Howard's eyes glaze over, the film restates it's core theme: that narcissism takes a heavy toll, both on the narcissist, and the lives of the people they touch.