Cast: Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio

Director: Sam Mendes

Screenplay: Justin Haythe

Running time: 2 hrs

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:

Sam Mendes, the bold genius behind the Oscar-winning American Beauty, has already been familiar of the neatly trimmed hedges of Americana suburbia encircling wonderfully white houses peopled with business suit-clad husbands, tidy wives and cheerful children – yes, that picture you see in breakfast cereal ads. He advocated that beneath the comfy, postcard-perfect picture are actually unfulfilled lives, crumbling relationships and desperate souls being repressed. Now, he reunites Titanic supernovas Leonardo DiCapri and Kate Winslet (the director’s wife) into the screen with a concept and anticipates a collision of stars. Revolutionary Road turns out to be a retread.


There’s no denying that this is a bold, blustery picture of a husband and wife battling it down bourgeois suburban lane. Seen in the first reel, we get past their courtship all too quickly and then cut to their bleak lives in almost endless verbal shouting matches. The talents of the lead here ignite and they convince us of the plausibility of their characters, Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet respectively), who are both stuck with their mid-life crisis, the conformity of their marriage that they barely understand themselves. As April’s suggestion to relocate to Paris, a folly it may be, seems the only thing that would save their relationship, but to Frank’s dithering twat of a husband behaves careless and easily pulled into orthodox existence. Which lead us to sympathise more on Winslet’s April, this five-time Oscar-nominated actress draw a depressed idealist whose walls around her squash her spirits to a point where she makes a decision that results in devastating consequences, a decision to which we somehow nod in agreement. This is a level of a performance that should be seen and felt. DiCaprio, however, is too talented, too compelling for the role a maladroit husband, a boring slipshod of a business worker who cannot take a risk. And both are in a film that tries to say something about marriage, life and the ripples of our decisions – but after American Beauty, and also The Hours and Little Children, the message arrives wrapped in a cliché. Except for that psychologically disturbed character who rants at the couple, he actually might have been the one revealing the truth in this film.


VERDICT:

Sharpened to a magnitude of a performance by Winslet, Revolutionary Road is an adequate picture, albeit an all-too familiar one. This suburban lane needs a lot more than Sam Mendes to revitalise it.



RATING: B-