Spoiler warning, though if you can’t tell from the preview that this movie is going to end in tears, I don’t know what to do for you.
Some critics (like Roger Ebert) loved “Revolutionary Road”, calling it a near flawless film and rightfully falling all over themselves to praise Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio’s performances, the sort where the actors immerse themselves so thoroughly in the character that it’s sort of scary. In fact, I’d say that the only thing I’d really change about the movie, having seen it last night, is the atrocious score, which was a major problem in Sam Mendes’ much more beloved film “American Beauty”. There were at least 5 separate scenes where merely taking the music out would have made a powerful difference, especially the dancing scene in the bar, where the film score swells in and the swing band in the background is drowned out, when the swing music would have been so much more effective. But on the whole, a minor quibble.
“Revolutionary Road” is way better than “American Beauty”. There. I said it. It’s probably because Mendes is working from the lost classic by Richard Yates from 1962 by the same title, a book that I think had a profound impact on the show “Mad Men”, and confirming to me that the best way to tell these sorts of stories is to immerse yourself in works of art mining the same territory but from the actual era they’re critiquing. The Alan Ball script for “American Beauty” had a loose nature to it, with lots of scenes that felt profound but weren’t (plastic bag *cough*), and this script is based on a novel that deliberately dispenses with quaint little pseudo-profoundities. “American Beauty” had a lot of scenes that didn’t quite make sense upon reflection, whereas everything in this film fits together nicely. The plastic bag in this story is a man on a day leave from an insane asylum whose main problem is speaking truth, but as a device it works much better because you find yourself truly unnerved by the guy. The plastic bag in “American Beauty” made me scratch my head and I suspect, to this day, that most people who praise that scene figure that everyone else saw something deep there and they don’t want to be left out, so they faked getting it until they felt like they really did. But no, it’s really not that deep.