Revolutionary Road is the first novel by Richard Yates , American writer who is little known in Italy at home but had no influence on people like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. The film is very beautiful, and heartbreaking: Justin Haythe's script is excellent, the characters are alive and real in their hysteria and despair, plunged up to their necks in bad living that has no escape routes. And the contrast is the main theme of "Revolutionary Road : contrast between dream and reality, between husband and wife, between the icy surface of existence fully realized and the relentless torment the souls of the characters, painfully aware of their hypocrisy and of his captivity in a social context totally bogus.
Mendes's direction I am reminded of his wonderful movie a few years ago, American Beauty : there is the same atmosphere, much like a soundtrack, a photograph (by Roger Deakins, large) as beautiful and bright as significant to hide the reality of things, full of dark pain. As in American Beauty , even in Revolutionary Road appearance is terribly opposed to the truth, then as now the director delves deeply, mercilessly, in the dark space between what seems and what it is.
Acting Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent: they are perfect to play a couple of outsiders hidden, neurotic and double-sided. Winslet is so sorrowful and submissive to be moving, DiCaprio is full of anger and frustration, and knows how to touch the madness, and both are admirably pathetic. And there's something brilliant in their being together again after Titanic: James Cameron's film if their characters, young and naive, he embarked on a journey from Europe to America, full of hopes and desires, the path that would take Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road is exactly the reverse. Leave the suburbs of Connecticut to get a postcard new life in Paris, back to being young and carefree even thirty years and two dependent children. In short it is as if there were Jack and Rose arrived together in America, and now, after realizing their dreams as if they were only illusions, had decided to go back.
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