Revolutionary Road

Viewer Rating:Pradaprincess has rated Revolutionary Road rating: 4 Star

Jack ( Di Caprio ) and April ( Winslet ) seem the perfect couple. They excude a uniqueness that others seem to see. Their neighbour is in love with Aril. The Real Estate woman played by Kathy Bates is comfortable bringing her psychiatric son to visit their house for tea. All this and their perfect house with two perfect children and a cadillac outside the front door is not enough. In fact it is tortuous for both Jack and April. Jack hates his job and sees him self as a reincarnation of his father who worked in the same office for 30years. This idea is a nightmare for Jack and yet it provides a strange comfort for him that he cannot or wont escape. April for her part imagines for her life something more. She sees an alternative life for herself and Jack to give expression to his brilliance. She is trapped in a 1950 stereotryical housewife body that she loathes. After a bruising arguement between the pair which sees Jack takes refuge in the arms of an unassuming secretary April comes around and details her plan for them both in Paris. This we are told was always Jacks intention to go back to Paris where people are "alive" For a while we see a love rekindled and Jack and April embody a partnership that is full of hope and full of potential. In that brief period they relay their plans to their neighbours and Jack does the same with his work colleagues. People are perplexed. How could you question the American Dream, especially when you have it! Notwithstanding circumstances conspire against Jack and April or maybe for April alone. Jack get offered a more compelling job at his employ and April falls pregant. It is only then that we see that Jack is really reluctant to embrace difference for fear of failure or for not being what he is cracked up to be by his wife. April it seems does not love her children and hadnt really envisaged having children at all. A third child is not in her plans and we see that in fact she is contemplating a self imposed abortion to make sure her plans to escape sububia and all that it stands for are not sucpored. In this episode we witness a very calculating April who plays an almost insane character losing the plot. Jack is beside himself and realises he is losing her. In a few tragic frames we witness Jack confused and lost as he goes to work whilst April numbling goes about aborting her child. The tragedy is made real while Jack plays a grief stricken husband waiting for his wife in Hospital. Unfortunatel for us the viewer we are dragged along for some more cringing material as we dip back into suburbia and see how Jack and April's neighbours quickly hide the disgrace and Cathy Bates makes them out to have been weird all along. This ending is a bit cringe worthy and we could have been spared the obvious. This is a brilliant expose of a marriage in freefall and a brilliant demonstration of boredom and loathing for dull suburbia and 1950s America.

Review published on the 01 February 2009 10:01