Review: Revolutionary Road

Review: Revolutionary Road

Rating: ***1/2

Nonna's Rating: $$$

Rotten Tomatoes: 71%

I had decided not to like this movie. Several friends told me it was depressing -- a downer. And I expected it to be imitative of Mad Men, the outstanding AMC series about the secret lives of ad executives in the early 1960s. In a way, it is like Mad Men. The story focuses on a marriage in trouble and people smoke and drink incessantly -- even while they're pregnant. But the movie transcends all this.

The story proceeds in a straightforward manner: a young couple meet, get married, move to the suburbs, discover that their dreams have dissolved, try to recover them,and fall apart. It sounds ordinary. It sounds dull and boring. It's not -- in part because Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio deliver excellent performance; in part because their story is the story of 50% of American marriages.

There is also a special time-long-gone poignancy in watching the lives of men and women of the mid-fifties -- men who had returned from war and women who wore dresses and heels to do their housework. I could not help but think of the lives of my parents and their friends -- their dreams and disappointments

My friends were correct. It's not a happy movie, but it is balanced in the way it refrains from assigning blame for what occurs to the husband or the wife. They are both culpable.

Kathy Bates as their neighbor/realtor is her usual marvelous self, but it is the performance of Micheal Shannon that is truly mesmerizing. Into the ordinary, suburban world of Kate and Leo, Shannon drops like an atom bomb, telling truth, pointing out inconsistencies and subterfuge. He definitely deserves his Academy Award nomination.

Nonna's Ratings:

$$$$ = Worth paying the Friday evening price
$$$= Worth paying the Matinee price
$$= Worth a rental
$ = Wait for cable
# = Skip it