Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon
The Buzz: Nominated in Best Supporting Actor, Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction categories
The Run: Won Golden Globe for Best Actress (Drama)
Fast-Food Cassavetes
No established director’s filmography seems to be complete without a familial drama. This year is the turn of Academy Award winning theatre director Sam Mendes. Revolutionary Road follows the happy married life of a couple, played by Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, gradually disintegrating to debris. The lead pair reunite 11 years after Titanic (1997), proving that if the iceberg doesn’t get you, marriage will.
First off, Revolutionary is damn riveting. You are hooked to the screen even if the dispute between the couple seems redundant and outright silly. The performances are generally convincing but that’s strictly a matter of subjectivity (Imagine, both of them got nominations in the Golden Globe, snubbed by the Academy). But what hurts is Mendes’ heavy-handed execution of the plot. He seems to show us how empty the lives are and how fake their passions are – a theme that’s 50 years old. Mendes knows this and cleverly places his film in that era. But he derives the film rather than letting it evolve. Every scene exists not because they are beautiful by themselves, but because they are the cause to the next. Each one seems calculatingly placed in order to push forth the stale state of affairs. He cuts to the drama forcefully. One more. The Michael Shannon character is a consequence of Mendes’ supreme lack of confidence in his own direction. Where directors like Cassavetes and Antonioni left the audience on its own to grapple some meaning out of it all, Mendes safely verbalizes the lead pair’s opinions about each other through Shannon. And he hides this sham under the remarkable performance of Shannon and the unstable state of the character’s mind.
I am still skeptic about the costumes in the film. The film seems to take place in the 1950’s. But I can’t believe that men still wore hats and blazers whenever they went out. Of course, this might have been researched before put into execution. But what if it wasn’t? Revolutionary Road still makes up for a decent drama for anyone willing to witness something shallow yet grave, depressing and absorbing. Kate and Leo, that’s why you shouldn’t carry on with acquaintances from journeys!
The Seventh Art 
February 1, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Haven’t seen the film, but re your scepticism about ‘hats and blazers’, I suspect that you haven’t watched that many Hollywood films of the 1950s and 60s. It’s an interesting question when the appearance of American men actually changed in the movies. I think it’s probably around 1966. Up to that time, well-dressed men often had a hat.
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February 1, 2009 at 7:20 pm
That is true. The ones I watched had men either in the war or in a heist! So no clue over there.
You point out an exact year, 1966. Any special reason?
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February 2, 2009 at 1:20 am
It’s just a guess, not a result of research. My reasoning is that in the mid-1960s mainstream Hollywood finally began to get hip to the young fashions, to some extent those coming out of London and other European cities. It was also partly the switch to younger directors, younger art designers etc. In my mind’s eye are those black and white thrillers, often political thrillers, of the early 1960s when the FBI men would have hats and long raincoats/overcoats. By 1968, similar characters are hatless and coatless. I don’t think Steve McQueen ever wore a hat, but I’m sure Karl Malden did. That kind of thing. Look up “Karl Malden” on Google Images – he’s in a hat several times on the first page.
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February 20, 2009 at 9:34 pm
[…] Shannon for Revolutionary Road […]
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March 4, 2009 at 9:08 pm
[…] momentum (but never without a direction). Watching The Prefab People, one can see why Mendes’ Revolutionary Road doesn’t exactly […]
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June 6, 2009 at 6:32 pm
[…] And this is the kind of gradual disintegration of sanity that many films fail to portray credibly (Revolutionary Road (2008) comes to mind first). What happens obscures how it all happens. Cinema becomes text. […]
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