Cranky, mean-spirited, irredeemably horrid April (Kate Winslet) drives home from an unsuccessful foray into amateur theatre. His hapless husband Frank (Leonardo Di Caprio) makes a pathetic attempt to console her before they pull into a lay way where she shrieks at him for what seems like an eternity.
They return home to their clichéd 1950s Conniticut suburb for more unarmed combat and ennui. He heads off to his city job in advertising. He callously sleeps with an office floozy then returns home to the wife and kids. They whine about how terrible their affluent, privileged lives are. She hatches a harebrained schemed to move to France. It doesn’t pan out. They resume shrieking at each other. She cheats on him. They scream some more. She threatens to have an abortion. They shout at each other for the rest of the movie.
If Barack Obama decides he’d quite like to keep Guantanamo Bay open after all, he might do well to pipe this dreadful drama into the cells of the naughtier suspects. There are perhaps three tolerable things in this entire sorry enterprise and two of those are the opening and closing credits.
Divorced from the interior monologue of the source novel by Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road gives us nobody and nothing to root for. Its choking misanthropy exists, like the warring couple’s endless arguments, without any context or corrective. Imagine Scenes From A Marriage without substance, inner-life or competence. Picture Neil La Bute’s nastier creations without diabolical wit. Think Adult Learning Annex doing Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
For all the bickering, there’s not an ounce of internal tension, nothing to hold your attention beyond noise and hot air. Neither lead comes out of this fracas looking well. Mr. Di Caprio hangs in there by his fingernails with a cockamamie Marlon Brandon impersonation. Ms. Winslet, whose campaign to get an Oscar for this trash has rivalled Operation Barbarossa , puts on a showy but limited display. For all her emoting, hers is a one-note performance. It’s a big, loud showy note, the rough equivalent of those blousy, warbling sustains affected by girls on The X Factor, but – count ‘em – there’s only the one. No wonder the Academy wasn’t buying. As anyone who isn’t a member of the dopey, erratic Hollywood Foreign Press Association might tell you, there’s a world of difference between acting and bellowing.
Our one ray of sunshine in this murk is Michael Shannon, the great unsung actor, as the wandering mental patient who occasionally pops up to point out how shallow bourgeois existence is. The part, a Lear’s fool for the Valium age, is totally schematic but Shannon pulls it out of the fire. If only he could do the same for director Sam Mendes’ career.