|
|
 |
| |
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet endure suburban strife as the Wheelers in the excellent Revolutionary Road |
Revolutionary Road - Kate Winslet’s on the road to more awards
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
Directed by Sam Mendes
LIFE in the neat homes of Revolutionary Road is anything but. This Connecticut suburb is full of happy couples and their happy families.
It’s a street of conformists.
But is all what it seems behind the white picket fences?
Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio combine as the seemingly blissful Wheeler couple. They have it all: he with a dead safe job, her with a beautiful home to manage and two perfect kids.
But as we discover in the opening five minutes, all is not well with the Wheelers, and in this careful film by Sam Mendes, a tragic story of two people trying to make sense of their expectations of life is brilliantly played out.
April Wheeler, we discover, would have liked to become an actress, but her talents did not match her expectations and now she’s facing a life sentence of house-wifery. Vile characters pop up to hammer home the claustrophobia she feels: the estate agent who sold them their house and her mentally ill son, who tells them how it really is; the neighbours who are envious of the “perfect’’ life being lived next door; Frank’s work colleagues who react with envy to his plans to pack it all in and flee to Paris – and then smile smugly when problems arise with planning the adventure.
The pacing is superb, the rottenness of peer pressure laid bare.
It’s called the “Boffo” syndrome – putting your “Best, Or False, Face On” to conform to the expectations of your peer group. The crux of the story is April’s refusal to do so. At one point she barks at her husband: “I don’t love you. You are just a boy who once made me laugh at a party.” It is a stinging rebuke delivered with depth.
This is not a film to take a Valentine’s date to. And forget Winslet in The Reader – she is on award-winning form here. However, away from her rages and frustration, it is clear she does love Frank, and wants to save him from a terrifying slippage into old age where he doesn’t achieve what he could, just what society expects him to.
Mendes, who captured the nuances of 1990s life in American Beauty so well, has taken the same theme and pasted it into the 1950s. It is garish at times but always brilliant. Painful, tragic, dramatic and very watchable. |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
