Well-Acted
Added 10/30/2009
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play Frank and April, a young couple with two children living a comfortable lifestyle. Frank has a good job in the city and April, who failed at being an actress, is a housewife. April is very unhappy; she looks at her husband and herself as "special people" who were not meant to live ordinary lives so convinces her husband to move to Paris, where she intends to work and where she hopes he will find the person he's meant to become. The two seem to communicate at different levels and April verges on severe depression. Frank is offered an opportunity to move up in his company and begins to have second thoughts about moving to Paris. He has an affair with a coworker and April has a one-nighter with a neighbor. The movie moves forward via the characters' interactions with one another and constant misunderstandings. Winslet and DiCaprio, together for the first time since "Titanic", have a chemistry on-screen that works for them. They play off one another well and their confrontations are realistic.
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Easily one of the best films of 2008
Added 10/26/2009
The Bottom Line:
It didn't get the Best Picture nomination it deserved and Kate Winslet got a trophy for her inferior performance in The Reader, but Sam Mendes's brilliant adaptation of Revolutionary Road deserves to be recognized for the way it breathes new life into the cliched subject of American suburbia: with its perfect cast, beautifully stark cinematography, vitriolic screenplay and agonizing conclusion, this is a searing and nearly great film.
3.5/4
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Not as good as the book.
Added 10/24/2009
This movie is good, but the book is much better.
I liked Kate Winslet's performance very much; Leonardo diCaprio I still can't take seriously as an actor.
Actors like Leonardo diCaprio, Tom Cruise and a host of others have faces that hardly look like they've experienced much in life.
Contrast their faces with the faces of not just actors in the 1930s and 1940s but also directors.
-- Peter Lorre versus Tom Cruise.
-- Erich Von Stroheim versus Steven Spielberg.
-- John Garfield versus Leonardo diCaprio.
-- Mike Nichols versus John Ford.
This is what's missing from the movie version of "Revolutionary Road." I just can't take Leonardo's LA-lovin' baby-face seriously.
Also, the structure of the movie doesn't do justice to what Richard Yates was trying to get across in the book. Yates was saying something fundamental about "the American way of life" -- whereas the people who made the movie (and you can hear this in the DVD extras) were more concerned with the "relationship" between the husband and the wife.
A movie can't ask "Big Questions" about a culture by sarting with the personal; it has to start more generally with the socio-economic realities of time. The questions Yates raised in his 1961 book are shied away from by modern-day, post-9/11 filmmakers. Thus the irony -- a movie based on a book about cultural conformity afraid to step outside the boundaries of present-day cinematic conformity.
Interestingly enough, Leonardo diCaprio in the DVD featurette talk about how the movie is about how one often is guided by what their parents want them to do, versus what they themselves would like to be. True enough, but Yates in his book is saying much more than that. His focus is not simply on specific individual relationships but rather the social, political and economic forces that, ironically, most Americans have been brainwashed into believing don't affect specific individual relationships.
These forces are what history and sociology and economics and politics are all about. But modern-day Hollywood is, for the most part, scared to death to suggest to an audience that an individual is often NOT in control of their destiny; that the world is more clearly understood not in individual terms but rather in terms of collective social, economic, political and historical forces.
The movie shows these forces but only to a certain extentl for example, the outflux of white-collar workers from the suburbs into the anomic vastness of Grand Central Station. But only as a backdrop to Leonardo diCaprio's *personal* heartache.
This focus on the individual as opposed to a focus on the societal forces at work is heard again and again in the voiceover commentary of the screenwriter and the director. They love the story but only as "a story." There's no attempt to present to the audience a "system of reasoning," a way of thinking about America in the 1950s and, by implication, America today.
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Biggest Gagger of all times, can you say give the girl happy pills
Added 10/17/2009
This movie is about the stupidest flick we ever saw. My mother in law, my wife and I all watched this gagger and honestly could not figure out why we did not turn it off after 10 minutes.
Life sucks, then you get married, have kids and it turns to hell, we get it! We don't need two hours of fighting and unhappiness to prove what we already know. Life is challenging and you have to enjoy the good things when you can. In this movie there is no good things to enjoy, only misery and fighting.
The movie features a nutjob who understand the wives desire to move to Paris France and chuck, all reality and responsibility. The wife in this flick seriously needs prozac or some other mood altering drug. She is unstable and in need of psychiatric help at best. She want to get a secretaries job for a government firm in Paris which makes good money supposedly and allow her husband to be a stay at home bum so he can discover what he wants to do with his life. Mind you, she does not have a job offer, she just knows of these jobs and wants to chuck everything to go there and try to get one. There is no planning or realistic pursuit of this aspiration. Can you say serious loss of reality? When she does not get her way and get to chuck life and move to Paris, she gives herself a home abortion because she is pregnant with a kid neither her or her husband wants and commits suicide. Both the husband and wife have affairs, his is a long time deal with a girl at work, hers is a one time thing(we think, not really sure, they make it seem like this may be something that has happened before?), with next door neighbors husband who says he loves her.
This whole movie is confusing pointless and another Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet flop as far as I am concerned. I hated Titanic! I do not like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and have never seen a movie by either of them that I have enjoyed. My wife on the other hand liked Titanic, but agrees with me that this movie was a serious waste of time!
I would recommend you stay as far away from this rotten movie as possible, obviously there are a few people that liked this movie, how or why I just cannot understand?
0 out of 2 people found this helpful.
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The 'Road' Not Taken
Added 10/17/2009
Director Sam Mendes reunites wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio ("Titanic") for the film adaptation of Richard Yates' groundbreaking novel. Leo and Kate star as Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple struggling to make life in 1950s suburbia, and a soulcrushing marriage, work. When you get pass the marital spats, the performance of the cast is what Frank's boss would call a "crackerjack." This includes Kathy Bates (another "Titanic" co-star) as a busybody neighbor and Michael Shannon as her mentally unhinged son. However, though the script follows the book like holy writ, so much backstory was left out that you only get the gist of what all the fuss is about. As a result, the viewer sees almost no reason to commit to the characters. Though it's doubtful that the film's delected scenes would have amounted to much, at least they would have provided much-needed character insight. It's just another case of what happens when you try squeezing several hundred pages into two hours of film.
This film is rated R: Violence, Brief Nudity, Adult Language, Adult Situations, Strong Sexual Content.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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Well-Acted
Added 10/30/2009
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play Frank and April, a young couple with two children living a comfortable lifestyle. Frank has a good job in the city and April, who failed at being an actress, is a housewife. April is very unhappy; she looks at her husband and herself as "special people" who were not meant to live ordinary lives so convinces her husband to move to Paris, where she intends to work and where she hopes he will find the person he's meant to become. The two seem to communicate at different levels and April verges on severe depression. Frank is offered an opportunity to move up in his company and begins to have second thoughts about moving to Paris. He has an affair with a coworker and April has a one-nighter with a neighbor. The movie moves forward via the characters' interactions with one another and constant misunderstandings. Winslet and DiCaprio, together for the first time since "Titanic", have a chemistry on-screen that works for them. They play off one another well and their confrontations are realistic.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Easily one of the best films of 2008
Added 10/26/2009
The Bottom Line:
It didn't get the Best Picture nomination it deserved and Kate Winslet got a trophy for her inferior performance in The Reader, but Sam Mendes's brilliant adaptation of Revolutionary Road deserves to be recognized for the way it breathes new life into the cliched subject of American suburbia: with its perfect cast, beautifully stark cinematography, vitriolic screenplay and agonizing conclusion, this is a searing and nearly great film.
3.5/4
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Not as good as the book.
Added 10/24/2009
This movie is good, but the book is much better.
I liked Kate Winslet's performance very much; Leonardo diCaprio I still can't take seriously as an actor.
Actors like Leonardo diCaprio, Tom Cruise and a host of others have faces that hardly look like they've experienced much in life.
Contrast their faces with the faces of not just actors in the 1930s and 1940s but also directors.
-- Peter Lorre versus Tom Cruise.
-- Erich Von Stroheim versus Steven Spielberg.
-- John Garfield versus Leonardo diCaprio.
-- Mike Nichols versus John Ford.
This is what's missing from the movie version of "Revolutionary Road." I just can't take Leonardo's LA-lovin' baby-face seriously.
Also, the structure of the movie doesn't do justice to what Richard Yates was trying to get across in the book. Yates was saying something fundamental about "the American way of life" -- whereas the people who made the movie (and you can hear this in the DVD extras) were more concerned with the "relationship" between the husband and the wife.
A movie can't ask "Big Questions" about a culture by sarting with the personal; it has to start more generally with the socio-economic realities of time. The questions Yates raised in his 1961 book are shied away from by modern-day, post-9/11 filmmakers. Thus the irony -- a movie based on a book about cultural conformity afraid to step outside the boundaries of present-day cinematic conformity.
Interestingly enough, Leonardo diCaprio in the DVD featurette talk about how the movie is about how one often is guided by what their parents want them to do, versus what they themselves would like to be. True enough, but Yates in his book is saying much more than that. His focus is not simply on specific individual relationships but rather the social, political and economic forces that, ironically, most Americans have been brainwashed into believing don't affect specific individual relationships.
These forces are what history and sociology and economics and politics are all about. But modern-day Hollywood is, for the most part, scared to death to suggest to an audience that an individual is often NOT in control of their destiny; that the world is more clearly understood not in individual terms but rather in terms of collective social, economic, political and historical forces.
The movie shows these forces but only to a certain extentl for example, the outflux of white-collar workers from the suburbs into the anomic vastness of Grand Central Station. But only as a backdrop to Leonardo diCaprio's *personal* heartache.
This focus on the individual as opposed to a focus on the societal forces at work is heard again and again in the voiceover commentary of the screenwriter and the director. They love the story but only as "a story." There's no attempt to present to the audience a "system of reasoning," a way of thinking about America in the 1950s and, by implication, America today.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
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