Military Movies - Military Times

Movie review: ‘Revolutionary Road,’ 4 stars

If you’re looking for a feel-good movie, steer clear of “Revolutionary Road,” a new big-screen version of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel.

Spitting truths as powerful as they are uncomfortable, the film is a primal scream against the straitjackets in which many of us live our lives — out of necessity, fear or both — that is brought to vivid life by director Sam Mendes and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who reunite for the first time since “Titanic.”

Set in 1955, in the middle of the decade usually cited as the zenith of American conformity, the film tells of Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet), a young couple who believe they’re destined for some undefined greatness.

She’s studying acting while he’s trying to figure out what his grand destiny might be. But April has zero acting talent. When she gets pregnant, and then again, they move to the suburbs and she becomes a homemaker in aprons and pearls, while he takes the path of least resistance, a mind-numbing sales job at the same faceless company for which his father toiled for 20 years.

The drudgery of this “career” is artfully captured by Mendes as Frank slips on his gray flannel suit, skinny tie and fedora and joins a multitude of other men in gray flannel suits, skinny ties and fedoras for the train ride into the city, where they all trudge upward like zombies to their mandatory eight hours of soul-sucking boredom.

Frank and April tell themselves it’s all temporary, that one day soon they’ll bust out and leave the blandness to live interesting lives doing interesting things.

But the days stretch out, each interchangeable with the next. April begins to despair well before Frank, who finds an ego-stroking distraction in a tawdry affair with a naive office clerk (Zoe Kazan).

April finally hits upon a solution: She, Frank and the kids will move to Paris, where she’ll get a secretarial job while Frank finally will have time to tap into his latent greatness.

This news shocks all who know them, including their best friends Shep (David Harbour) and Milly (Kathryn Hahn), both suffering similar angst about their lives but unwilling or unable to confront it.

But at heart, Frank is as leery of the Paris idea as he is lured by it because it may well prove his deep-seated fear that he is not, in fact, special in any way. As long as he stands pat, he can maintain the fiction.

For April, that’s not an option. She grows despondent with her life and begins to loathe Frank, whom she nails to the wall in 12 words: “You’ve never tried anything. If you never try, you can never fail.”

Mendes draws ferocious performances from his cast. Some scenes pin you back in your seat, others unleash unexpected shots of dark humor.

And as he did with his other classic tale of suburban angst, “American Beauty,” Mendes fills the screen with telling details — right to the final frame, in which we’re reminded once again that each of us does what we have to do to get through the day, and the night that follows.

The story may be set in the 1950s, but what Yates had to say about people being afraid to reach for their dreams surely resonates in any age.

Don’t think so? The next time you’re driving through one of the endlessly sprawling, claustrophobically dense tracts of suburban cookie-cutter homes with manicured lawns, contemplate how many silent screams might be riding the wind around you.

———

Rated R for sexuality, language, mature themes and rampant alcohol and tobacco use.