By a Cinephile
Mendes leaves us in silence. The universe doesn't care that April Wheeler died to escape the void. The neighbors will gossip, the grass will grow, and another young couple will move into 115 Revolutionary Road to start the cycle anew. Revolutionary Road is not a date movie. It is a horror movie. It is The Shining without the ghosts, Rosemary’s Baby without the devil. The monster here is the "American Dream"—the mortgage, the promotion, the affair, the pregnancy, the resignation. revolutionary road xem phim
The couple believes they are different. They look down on their real estate agent, Mrs. Givings (a brilliant Kathy Bates), and her lobotomized son, John (Michael Shannon). They cling to the memory of their youth—Frank’s aimless charm and April’s desperate hope. But as Yates wrote, they were "hoping to be more than themselves." The tragedy is that the suburbs have smoothed their edges into blunt conformity. The film’s emotional fulcrum is the "Paris Plan." After a disastrous play performance (a brilliant sequence that shows April’s failure as an artist), the couple fights on a roadside. The next morning, April proposes a radical escape: sell the house, quit the jobs, and move to Paris. Frank will "find himself" (a shocking concept for the 1950s), while April will work as a secretary for the French government. By a Cinephile Mendes leaves us in silence
To "xem phim" Revolutionary Road is to look into a mirror that reflects our own fears of settling, of selling out, of waking up at forty to realize we have become the people we swore we would never be. DiCaprio gives his most vulnerable performance as a man who hates his weakness; Winslet gives the performance of her career as a woman who refuses to live with hers. Revolutionary Road is not a date movie
April dies on the way to the hospital. Frank collapses in the street, screaming. The dream is dead. The final act of Revolutionary Road is the most damning. We cut to the neighbors: Shep and Milly Campbell (David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn). They discuss the tragedy over the phone. There is a flicker of genuine grief, but it is quickly smothered by social nicety.
John serves as the film’s chorus and its executioner. He sees the Paris plan for what it is: a desperate act of life. When Frank admits they are staying because of the pregnancy, John sneers. He calls the unborn child "a clever little fetus" used as an excuse for cowardice. In a devastating dinner scene, John eviscerates the Wheelers’ pretensions: "You think you’re better than everyone else, but you’re not. You’re just as plain and ordinary as everybody else."