Revolutionary Road (2008)

If you were to combine the last two films reviewed, The Reader and Magnificent Obsession, you’d probably get something like Revolutionary Road. This is a powerfully acted, well directed film that grafts deep character insights onto melodrama terrain. Based on the very well regard 1961 novel by Richard Yates , this is The Man in the Gray Flannel Suite by way of Alan Ball, which seems appropriate in that it was directed by American Beauty’s Sam Mendes. April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DeCaprio, finally beginning to show his age) are a young 1950's married couple whose bohemian dreams become submerged beneath existentially oppressive suburban conformity. After appearing in a stinker of a community theater production and realizing that her long deferred dreams of being an actress are never to be, April revives and convinces Frank to agree to a long abandoned plan that the couple move to Paris (because “people are alive there, not like here”). For a while this seems to be the couples hope of salvation, as the emotional conditions in their marriage vastly improve while preparing for their journey to Europe, which they plan to embark on in several months time. However circumstances change when April gets unexpectedly pregnant, and the conditions at Franks stifling dead-end job take a financially promising turn. The couple becomes divided into two camps, embracing opposite but both very legitimate perspectives on the hopes and needs, financial and spiritual, of their family and their marriage. Tennessee Williams territory is thusly entered, and there’s a lot of shouting.

A beautiful period look is enhanced by period faces. The ensemble supporting cast all manage to somehow look very 1950's physically. The Kathy Bates of fondly remembered irreverence, becomes subdued, smaller, as the Wheelers semi-obtrusive real estate agent, she evens manages to do a nervous eye flutter thing, that I would have thought it impossible to fake. The actor who plays Bates husband looks remarkably like Milton Berle, and Michael Shannon as the couples son evokes Oscar Levant in a multitude of ways. Dylan Baker gets a scene chewing role as a wryly comic drunk of a sort that just doesn’t fully translate in a modern film adaptation. One of the great things about this movie is not knowing how it’s going to end, and being kind of shocked at the ballsy way it ultimately does. This is the second best movie of the year, only slightly below The Reader in my estimation, and the best film about 1950's America since Far From Heaven (2002). 5 out of 5.