Revolutionary Road
DiCaprio and Winslet are reunited in Revolutionary Road
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Tuesday, 27, Jan 2009 02:25
Directed by Sam Mendes, out January 30th in cinemas, starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, running time 119 mins.
In a nutshell...
Dreams never come true
What's it all about?
For all their best intentions, Frank (DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Winslet) have become what they always set out to avoid, an ordinary suburban couple with frustrated dreams and a picture-perfect Connecticut house. When April conceives a bold plan to start afresh in Paris, the recriminations of the couple's ambitions are more damaging then they could have possibly imagined.
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Who's in it?
Revolutionary Road reunites six-time Oscar nominee Kate Winslet with her Titanic co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, himself a three-time Oscar nominee. Winslet made her breakthrough in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994) before earning her first Oscar nomination for 1995's Sense and Sensibility. A starring role as Rose in box office behemoth Titanic (1997) followed, with further Oscar nominations coming after Iris (2001), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Little Children (2006).
DiCaprio emerged in troubling drama This Boy's Life (1993), alongside Robert De Niro, before earning his first Oscar nomination for Lasse Hallstrom's What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993). He quickly became a global pinup after starring in Romeo + Juliet (1996) for Baz Luhrmann and Oscar-winner Titanic (1997), and has since worked with Danny Boyle (2000's The Beach), Steven Spielberg (2002's Catch Me If You Can) and Woody Allen (1998's Celebrity). The Hollywood-born actor has become Martin Scorsese's muse of late, starring in Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and the upcoming Shutter Island.
Director Sam Mendes is Winslet's husband and won the best director and best picture Oscars for his debut feature American Beauty (1999), after founding the influential Donmar Warehouse theatre in London. He also directed the seven-times Oscar-nominated Road to Perdition (2002) and Gulf war drama Jarhead (2005).
As an example...
"Our whole existence is based on the premise that we're special and superior to everyone else out here. But we're not." - April
"Sorry the kids aren't here." - April
"Don't worry, if I had a certified lunatic coming over, I'd get the kids out of the way too." - John
"We're running from the hopeless emptiness of the whole life here." - Frank
"Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness." - John
"You don't want to go. You've never tried anything, so you can't fail." - April
"It takes backbone to live the life you want." - April
Likelihood of a trip to the Oscars
Winslet was already named best actress at the Golden Globes - one of the film's four nominations - but it has been largely overlooked for the Academy awards, with Michael Shannon picking up a deserved best supporting actor nomination and further nods in the best art direction and costume design categories.
What the others say
"[A] didactic, emotionally overblown critique of the soulless suburbs." - Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter
"This film is so good it is devastating. A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?" - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times
So is it any good?
As a study in the inexorable march of fate and the likelihood that, nobody how hard you might try, your life will remain truly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it's magnificent.
Just as with his debut American Beauty, Mendes creates an absorbing study of suburban mediocrity, much helped on this occasion by some magnificent period detail, a Thomas Newman score that's both rousing and melancholy and, thanks to Richard Yates' dazzling first novel, a plot of painful, universal themes of failure and resignation.
If the above makes Revolutionary Road seem to be a depressing picture, such a portrait is entirely justified. Many a viewer will leave the theatre shocked and struggling for breath, having received a gut punch that seems to suggest that one should never get married or dare to dream, as both endeavours are doomed to die. Other, more optimistic audience members might vow to transform their own lives and strive to become all they can be. Like American Beauty, a film in which our protagonist kills himself, Revolutionary Road is a curiously life-affirming effort.
While Mendes and his crew are worthy of applause for this beautifully-lit, intensely moving piece, it's our principals who steal the show. Despite turning in one of his strongest performances in years, full of frustration at his dreams escaping before he could realise them, DiCaprio is blown off the screen by a career-best Winslet.
In a brave, frequently unsympathetic turn, she radiates sadness from every pore despite her elegance and with Newman's increasingly discordant score backing the unravelling of the Wheelers' lives, it is through April's eyes that we feel each marital betrayal and each cruel twist of fate.
A splendidly shot, wonderfully acted period drama that sees art imitating life in a bleak and profound fashion.
8/10
Lewis Bazley