Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is a brilliant, riveting movie with an absolutely heartbreaking ending. I haven’t read the novel, but Sam Mendes’s take on it is a great film.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performances as April and Frank Wheeler, a discontented young couple living in suburban Connecticut with their two children, are flawless. The unraveling of the Wheelers’ relationship is made tragic by the real love and passion they feel for each other, feelings only amplified by the realism of their bitter arguments and animosity. As April conveys in their last big blowout of the movie, love can too easily turn to hate, or loss of any feeling—on the surface—at all.

Michael Shannon as John, the mentally ill adult son of the Wheelers’ friend and real estate agent, Helen, played by Kathy Bates, is perfect as the voice of truth—truth inspiring and ugly—in the movie. A snide and angry sort of Greek chorus, he asks the questions no one will ask and makes the comments no one will make, a jarring foil to the suburban sleepiness all around the Wheelers.

My sympathies in the film lay with April. Frank is by turns no prize and wonderful, which is true of all of us, but while April is not perfect either—she does some terrible things of her own by the end of the film—Frank's contention that April needs a “shrink” because she does not want to have another baby—while he deals with his own emotional despair with a penchant for secretary screwing—is a particularly ugly piece of chauvinism. His dismissal of the Paris plan as unrealistic is weak, and John’s pointing out of that fact feels triumphant to watch. April probably does need therapy—of a twenty-first-century variety, not what she would probably have gotten in the shock-therapy-happy and abysmally gender-defined mid-1950s—but Frank’s reasoning for it is disgustingly insulting.

The lessons the film teaches are crucial: first, do not let your dreams die, for when they die, so do you, and you begin to kill everyone else. Frank’s boss tells him “you get one or two chances in life, and you’ve gotta grab them by the balls” after biting the morsel off his fork with a chomp like a big-nutted alligator, and, unfortunately, Frank is successfully manipulated by his mention of Frank’s salesman father and sees the promotion, rather than Paris, as that “chance.”

Lesson Two: do not let your dreams crush you. April falls victim to this.

And third: open yourself to love or you will die inside and take your marriage with you. Despite Frank’s faults, he is trying like hell to have a healthy relationship with April. While I sympathize with April when she tells him repeatedly to back off, this is because he is coming on so strong. We learn over the course of the movie that April’s refusal to talk about the issues right in front of their faces is what has led him to come on so strong. The morning after their last big fight is, in my mind, full of hope. For April, it is fraught with the same quiet desperation as before, but it does not have to be. She is doing the right things—she is taking an interest in Frank’s work and life, and he is blossoming under it before her eyes. If she would only see how much power she has, that one compliment from her can make Frank twice the man he was—for he adores her—they could pave a way to a real connection with or without a move away from suburbia. She feels powerless, but this is a tragic illusion.

The last scene is wonderfully symbolic as we listen to Bates’s Helen turn catty on the Wheelers and watch her husband turn down his hearing aid until he, and we, cannot hear her anymore. We now know how each of these tangential characters deals with their quiet desperation.

Grade: A+