Revolutionary Road English Movie
This is a film about the end of the marital dream and the advent of a nightmare that every relationship becomes when you drag it beyond the workable status.
"Revolutionary Road" is a strangely stylized yet stirring and sensitive portrait of a crumbling marriage. Unlike Sam Mendes' incredible-in-its-own-right "American Beauty", this film refuses to see the 'beauty' of the American dream. Instead it focuses on the dark and often ugly underbelly of a marriage that is sustained more by habit than genuine feelings.
DiCaprio and Winslet move so far away from their "Titanic" images they're hard to recognize in their new avatars as these stiff-upper lipped bourgeois couple of the suburban America of the 1950s.
The boredom that breaches the marriage and finally destroys the couple is never permitted to get larger than the portrait of a collapsing domesticity as seen through the non-judgemental eyes of a filmmaker who's familiar enough with the emotional and geographical territory of his plot to let the characters grow without too much intervention.
There are slabs of unexplored emotions dividing the couple as they decide to go beyond their shared boredom and mutual disaffection to give their marriage one more try by moving their stagnant togetherness to Paris.
DiCaprio and Winslet are in fine form giving their roles a cutting edge that takes this marital drama beyond what we expect in a film of this nature. Winslet is outstanding in projecting naked unalloyed emotions. She bares the most unbearable emotions and puts the emotional cards on the table without bothering with how cinematically apt she emerges in the flurry of feelings that carpet the plot.
Watching her demystify and reconstruct her wife's role in "Revolutionary Road", you wonder for which film she deserved the Oscar more: this or "The Reader".
Another stand-out act comes from the little-known actor Michael Shanon who, as the protagonists' dysfunctional neighbour, shows it like it is.
The 'truth' about human relationships is that they are founded on lies. With ruthless candour, director Sam Mendes excavates into the emptiness at the heart of a suburban marriage and comes up with an unsettling statement on the quality of life lived in the chasm between romance and disenchantment.
Interestingly, the couple's two children are seldom visible on screen. Marriage, says the film, doesn't needs external aid for degeneration.
The dying image of Kate Winslet bleeding to death on her living room carpet could be seen as a metaphor for all the neatly-sealed marital pacts which come apart at the seams long before death does them part.
On the other hand Winslet could be portraying just another lonely wife who wilts out of domesticated boredom.
Who would notice her if she wasn't who she is?
