REVOLUTIONARY ROAD(2008)

This movie is the bomb. Ever wonder what would happen if Jack from “Titanic” survived the freezing waters of the Atlantic and got married to Rose, settled down and had kids? What would their lives have been like? Would they have the perfect family and fairytale romance? Or would they become disillusioned with each other once the monotony of reality set in constantly argue with each other and make themselves miserable? Watch “Revolutionary Road” and you can find out what might have happened to them…

If you want to watch a movie with hard hitting acting, a good story, and a hefty dose of Stepfordian socio-domestic drama look no further. Both DiCaprio and Winslet deliver amazing performances of great emotional depth and insight. They deftly portray a young couple’s desperate struggle to break free from the drab confines of a 1950’s Connecticut suburbia known as Revolutionary Estates.

What I liked about “Revolutionary Road” was that it really humanizes the domestic struggles faced by middle-class suburban American couples of the 1950’s.
We see a young couple, Frank and April Wheeler, starting off with dreams, aspirations, and the belief in their own unique superiority as a happily married couple with a great future ahead of them. Over the course of the movie, we see the couple gradually compromise their ideals, dreams, and beliefs, eventually succumbing to the suburban reality that traps and confines them.

There are so many amazing moments of acting in “Revolutionary Road”. Leonardo DiCaprio brings it like a champ as Frank Wheeler, a salesman for Knox Business Machines who desperately wants to become a man worthy of his family all the while denying his own underlying need to discover his own personal passions and desires.

Meanwhile, Kate Winslet is both poignant and human in her role as a failed actress turned housewife whose deep seated need to be special causes her to devote her life to her husband and family at the expense of her self integrity and self-will.

There are also other amazing actors in this film. The most notable is Michael Shannon who steals scenes like a bandit in his role as John Givens, the formerly institutionalized son of the couple’s real estate agent. Shannon gives a strikingly brilliant performance as the one person who is able to see through the falseness of the couple’s lives and calls it how it is.

I would strongly recommend this movie to people who want to watch really good acting combined with good writing. Revolutionary Road takes the story of a seemingly idyllic, and in some sense typical, family unit from the 1950’s and shows what goes on underneath on the human level when people sacrifice their true dreams and ideals for the sake of appearances. The Wheelers are “that family”. The couple that started off with so much promise only to wind up in the end just another casualty of the 1950’s middle class suburban American dream.






If you liked this movie some other movies I'd recommend are:

The Departed, Titanic, American Beauty