Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road is a tough sell. One has to be in a fairly good emotional state to survive to the end. I wanted to lose myself in this tragic love story much as I did with 'The Deep Blue Sea', However, R. R. seems to leave you on the outside looking in. It is so conflicting, unsentimental and bleak that I felt very little for this couple. They seem weak-willed and pathetic much of the time. I remember Rex Reed called Revolutionary Road: " an autopsy of a marriage on the rocks." I think this reference to the marriage is totally wrong as it presumes there was a solid foundation of love and trust to begin with. The film itself feels like a pessimistic documentary of two lost souls. Everything points to grim and gruesome, conformity and frustration, all of it pointless and futile.

Is there much of anything to like in this film? It felt cold and distant as the characters are not especially nice persons. One would think these two were of the "ME" generation. They basically turned me off a good deal of the time. There were sparks of good acting from the two leads and particularly from Michael Shannon as a mental patient ( Oscar Nomination) But there is much to be desired from the direction of Sam Mendes who almost treats this movie like a theatrical production. Mendes offers nothing to cinematographer Roger Deakins whose work on Revolutionary Road is the poorest he's done in quite some time. This is a man with 12 Oscar Nominations. Some of the songs chosen to represent the period up to 1956 were extremely irritating, I don't believe these tunes are an accurate depiction of 1950's music, the screenplay made the best of the best part of the novel. Otherwise, there's nothing remarkable about it. I certainly watched Revolutionary Road to the end, often against my own will. I'm glad I slugged it out just to know the outcome of it all. This is a movie I disliked very much both from what it had to say and how it went about saying it.