Kate Winslet Movie:

		List Price: $39.99		Label: Paramount Salesrank: 16434 Released: June 2, 2009
		Our Price: $11.79
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		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Paramount Revolutionary Road (Blu-ray)In Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite for the first time since their careers exploded withTitanic--and it's almost as if they're playing the same characters, only married and faced with thehollowness of a 1950s suburban existence. Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) always thought of themselves as special, but they settled ina conventional Connecticut suburb when they had children. Hungry for a less constricted life, Aprilpersuades Frank to move to Paris--but slowly their plans unravel and their marriage unravels along with it. While Revolutionary Road may be a bit tooglib about suburban emptiness--the lives Frank and April lead don't seem so stifled--the portrait of a mismatched marriage is vivid and devastating. The ways that Frank and April misinterpret each other, and the subtle yet unbearable dissatisfactionthey feel, is rendered with remarkable and unsettling acuteness. Winslet and DiCaprio's natural chemistry tells us what drew these two together, making the way they tear each other apart all the moreshocking. The excellent supporting cast includes Kathy Bates (Misery), Dylan Baker (Happiness), andespecially Michael Shannon (Bug) as a mentally troubled mathematician who cuts to the quick of the Wheelers' troubles.

Description of Revolutionary Road [Blu-ray]:
In Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite for the first time since their careers exploded with Titanic--and it's almost as if they're playing the same characters, only married and faced with the hollowness of a 1950s suburban existence. Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) always thought of themselves as special, but they settled in a conventional Connecticut suburb when they had children. Hungry for a less constricted life, April persuades Frank to move to Paris--but slowly their plans unravel and their marriage unravels along with it. While Revolutionary Road may be a bit too glib about suburban emptiness--the lives Frank and April lead don't seem so stifled--the portrait of a mismatched marriage is vivid and devastating. The ways that Frank and April misinterpret each other, and the subtle yet unbearable dissatisfaction they feel, is rendered with remarkable and unsettling acuteness. Winslet and DiCaprio's natural chemistry tells us what drew these two together, making the way they tear each other apart all the more shocking. The excellent supporting cast includes Kathy Bates (Misery), Dylan Baker (Happiness), and especially Michael Shannon (Bug) as a mentally troubled mathematician who cuts to the quick of the Wheelers' troubles. Mention must be made of the beautiful production design; the costumes and sets are simply gorgeous. --Bret Fetzer




Stills from Revolutionary Road (Click for larger image)

Revolutionary Road [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Good acting carries an otherwise lame story
2009-11-23 - Only the talents of DiCaprio and Kate Winslet keep this story watchable.
Otherwise it is a lame story.

In a nutshell, this movie keeps hammering the point that the 1950's were not really as wonderful as portrayed in classic shows like Andy Griffith and Happy Days.
The film also attempts to portray the American Dream and Suburban living as a lie and a depressing prison.

Okay ..... we all know the "good old days" were not as pure and innocent as Happy Days ------ BUT, at the other extreme -------- neither were they as depressing and jaded as Revolutionary Road.
Unless of course you were dysfunctional and mentally unstable and generally negative about living.

This film attempts to send a message that the good life of the 1950s was all a lie of fake smiles, depressions, frustration and harmful materialism.

The characters in this film have a nice home in a quiet neighborhood, recently were chosen for a promotion and a raise, take vacations at the beach, etc..etc..etc..

The wife is in perpetual misery because her dream is to toss all this aside and go slum it up in Paris.
In the process she acts like a miserable person on the edge of a mental breakdown.

Her husband is no angel, but he certainly puts up with more of her whacky unstable behaviour than most would put up with.

The movie tries to hard to demonize the rise of middle class suburban living in America and offer a derivative view of life in the 1950s era.

The facts are not matter what time in history you examine, you will find people who are both happy and others who are miserable.

That is no different today than it was then.

However, having lived in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and today ....... I DO believe life in America was better 20-30 years ago.

And while there is no time in human history that is perfect (nothing involving people ever will be) ... I can certainly say living in the 70s and 80s in America was better than what we are experiencing today with the direction this Country is heading.









This Ain't Ozzie And Harriet
2009-11-10 - Over the past period I have seemingly endlessly retailed the experiences of my young adulthood during the 1960s, the time of the "generation of `68". That makes me, obviously, a child of the 1950s, the time period of this very interesting movie, "Revolutionary Road" based on a book by the darkly sardonic writer, Richard Yates. I have also seemingly endlessly pointed out my experiences and the effects they had as a result of growing up among the marginally working poor in that `golden age'. I am fond of saying that I didn't know there was any other condition than being poor for a long time. Well, I did find out there was and although in my youth I would still have had a hard time relating to the story line of this film. The `trials and tribulations', then, of an upwardly mobile, prosperous young couple, the Wheelers, Frank and April, with the mandatory two charming children and a nice leafy suburban house in some nice town in Connecticut would have gone over my head. Now though I can a little more readily appreciate the seamy psychologically paralyzing side of that existence.

As graphically portrayed in the film that seamy side (that also provided some of the most powerful scenes in the movie, and best acting moments by both Winslett and DiCaprio), the central driving force of the story), is the emptiness of middle class existence in the 1950s. Cookie-cutter is the word that came to mind as Frank and April try to break the golden bonds that keep them tied to their old life. One of the nice moments cinematically is the sequence involving Frank's routine workday morning ritual catching the train to New York City (along with all the other felt-hatted men, the symbol of success in that period). Another sober moment is when April takes out the rubbish in their deathless suburban tract and realizes that this life is not for her.

But how to break those golden chains? The issues presented here about consumerism, meaningless and vacuous work, the isolated role of women in the nuclear family, the eternal struggle for security in an individualistically-driven society are all issues that got a fuller workout and wider airing in the 1960s (and since). In a sense the `whimsical' Wheelers were too early. They were before their time. However, although times have changed, I will bet serious money that if you go to some Connecticut train station headed to New York City on any Monday morning you will see, two generations removed and without the hats, men and women making that same meaningless trip that old Frank made. Yates was definitely onto something about the nature of modern capitalist social organization. But I will confess something, although I know better now the stresses of that fate, I would not have minded, minded at all, growing up in that little `cottage' the Wheelers called home. That, however, is a story for another day.

Well-Acted
2009-10-30 - 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.

Easily one of the best films of 2008
2009-10-26 - 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

Not as good as the book.
2009-10-24 - 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.