(2008) "You're the most wonderful thing in the world," April (Kate Winslet) says to her husband, Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio): "You're a man." Mid-1950s, Frank hates working in an office in New York City for Knox, manufacturer of business machines, as his father had done for 20 years, commuting by train, while his homemaker wife takes care of their two children, Jennifer and Michael, on Revolutionary Road in Connecticut near Route 12.

(But where are the kids throughout this movie about the suburbs? Why aren't they running in and out of doors as my siblings and I did during the summer? Rarely are any children to be seen indoors or out.)

On his 30th birthday, Frank takes out the new office girl, Maureen Grube (Zoe Kazan), for martinis and a hotel room; when he arrives home late, April meets him at the door in a fancy black dress - apologizing for an earlier tiff, telling him how much she loves him - having a surprise of a cake with the two children wishing him a happy birthday.

Looking at a snapshot of Frank in military uniform, standing near the Eiffel Tower, once having thought Frank to be the most interesting person she'd ever met, April, her own dream of becoming an actress a bitter disappointment, conceives of their using the six-months worth of savings as well as selling the house to make a break from their having become "just like everyone else" and move to Paris where she can get employment as a secretary with NATO or an overseas American firm. She expectantly shares her idea with Frank, giving him "time to find out what you really want to do."

Based on Richard Yates's novel, director Sam Mendes's anti-Norman Rockwell portrait of mid-20th-century American middleclass life, with its stilted phoniness, offers no character with whom a sane person would care to relate. Only John (Michael Shannon), a once promising mathematician and son of real-estate agent Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) - who sold the Wheelers their house - and her husband (Richard Easton), away from the Pleasant Brook psychiatric hospital (where he has undergone dozens of electric-shock treatments) has any appeal with his unfeigned, unsparing pronouncements: "The nice young revolutionaries on Wheeler Road."

Helen, who at first tells April how "different" and "special" she seemed at first sight from her other clients - so pleased when April graciously agrees to entertain visits with the Givingses and their son - later says to her husband, as he mutes his hearing aid, that she regarded the Wheelers as "whimsical, neurotic."

Excitedly Frank and April tell their next-door neighbors, Milly (Kathryn Hahn) and Shep Campbell (David Harbour), of their intention to depart for Europe in September, astonishing (to their own delight) their friends with April's plan to support the family while Frank, reads and studies, exploring what he's meant to become. "This is it - this is the truth," exults Frank to April when they're alone, recalling a similar feeling at confronting the reality of war, which made him both scared and alive; April concurs that she hadn't felt so intensely alive since their first making love.

Ironically, at work Frank receives special attention from a company superior, Bart Pollock, for a memo he'd passed off capriciously, getting an offer of promotion, pay raise, and chance to join a select group of salesmen for a new venture into electronic business computers: "a fine memorial to your dad."

When Shep asks April, dejected from a turn of events ("a childish idea"), if she "Just wanted out," she replies: "I wanted in. I just wanted us to live again." Earlier when Frank had answered John's question by saying, "Maybe we are running" away from emptiness and hopelessness, the mental patient with mathematical precision remarked: "It takes real guts to see the hopelessness."

April, inhaling her thoughts while Frank exhales empty talk, recognizes John's insight into their circumstances: "Maybe we're just as crazy as he is." Had they been, they'd have been radicals of hope. Scoffing at the couple, John demeans Frank's manhood as nothing more than making babies: "Maybe you deserve each other."

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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