Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road (2008) is about the marriage of a young couple in fifties Connecticut, and both of them know they do not want this life. Frank and April have a house in the suburbs and two children, and Frank does dull work at the company his father worked for. One day April proposes moving to Paris: she will work while he finds out what he wants to do. The plan revives them both for a while. Then Frank is offered a promotion and April becomes pregnant. The rest of the film is how the plan is allowed to die. It comes from Richard Yates's 1961 novel, which sold poorly on publication and came to be counted among the harshest of American suburban novels. Sam Mendes had made American Beauty, and the two films dig at the same territory in different registers. The casting drew attention. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were together for the first time in the eleven years since Titanic, and this time they play a dissolution rather than a love story. Mendes was Winslet's husband at the time and directed it. Michael Shannon appears in a few scenes as a mathematician on leave from a psychiatric hospital and is the only honest character in it; he was nominated for supporting actor. It runs 119 minutes. Good for: marriage drama, period film, and performance. Less good for: there is no hope in it, the arguments are wearing, and the ending is heavy.