If Revolutionary Road had been filmed back in 1961, when the novel came out, it would have been timely and powerful.
Revolutionary Road (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:33
Fresh:23
Rotten:10
Average Rating:7/10
Consensus: Brilliantly acted and emotionally powerful, Revolutionary Road is a handsome adaptation of Richard Yates' celebrated novel.
Runtime: 1 hr 59 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:Dec 26, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $22,877,808
Synopsis: Those who were waiting for the romantic reunion of TITANIC's Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet may be surprised by what they find in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. The movie begins with a sweet scene where... Those who were waiting for the romantic reunion of TITANIC's Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet may be surprised by what they find in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. The movie begins with a sweet scene where Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) meet at a party, but the rest of this drama based on Richard Yates's novel is devoted to watching the destruction of their marriage and their selves in 1950s suburbia. Frank works at a job he hates in New York City, then commutes home to two children and a wife who feels none of them belong in their cookie-cutter town. Their realtor (a fine Kathy Bates) recognizes their specialness and introduces them to her mentally unstable son (BUG's Michael Shannon, in another good, unhinged performance) in an effort to establish some normalcy for the man. However, Frank and April's marriage is not as perfect as it seems to the outside world, and the audience gets to witness their downfall. With its commentary on conformity and finding identity, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD bears more than a passing resemblance in both theme and tone to the TV series MAD MEN and director Sam Mendes's previous film AMERICAN BEAUTY. The characters here may live in a polite age where men wear ties and hats and women clean the house in skirts and heels, but the dialogue often enters brutal territory. Less capable actors wouldn't have been able to capture the volatile chemistry between Frank and April, but DiCaprio and Winslet are as wonderful at uttering sweet nothings as they are at tearing each other apart with verbal barbs. Mendes, directing his wife, Winslet, for the first time, is a perfect match for the source novel's lack of sentimentality and its wry commentary on life in the 1950s that still resonates half a century later. [More]
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour, Kathy Bates, Zoe Kazan
Director: Sam Mendes
Director: Sam Mendes
Screenwriter: Justin Haythe
Producer: John Hart, Scott Rudin, Sam Mendes, Bobby Cohen
Composer: Thomas Newman
Studio: Paramount Vantage
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Release:
Jun 2, 2009
Blu-ray Disc Features:
- Region [unknown]
- NTSC
- Widescreen
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby True HD 5.1 - English
- Subtitles - English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Additional Release Material:
Additional Scenes:
- 1. Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary by Director Sam Mendes and Screenwriter Justin Haythe
Featurette:
- 1. Lives of Quiet Desperation: The Making of Revolutionary Road HD
- 2. Richard Yates: The Wages of Truth HD
Audio Commentary:
- 1. Sam Mendes - Director, Justin Haythe - Screenwriter
Trailers:
- 1. Theatrical Trailer HD
Reviews for Revolutionary Road
Bitter, nerve-wracking, ugly and relentless, Revolutionary Road is Big Drama done right, a mesmerizing look at desperate lives, wrong moves and spoiled dreams that hits hard right from the beginning and never lets up.
Viewers in the mood for rip-snorting marital combat should go ahead and partake, but they must prepare to leave the theatre in a state of profound depression.
Unlike the novel, which you can set aside and take a break, with the film version of Revolutionary Road, you're in for the duration, and it's ultimately too much to take.
Winslet gives a fearless performance here. It's not her fault her husband has shrouded it in Taste.
This film is so good it is devastating. A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?
Like its cinematic kin, Frost/Nixon and Doubt, this, too, is a delicately crafted, prestige project whose translation to screen doesn't deliver the original's amazements.
Sam Mendes has worked in this territory before with his Oscar-winning American Beauty. Revolutionary Road is a better movie because it doesn't rely on such blatant caricatures.
Revolutionary Road is easily the best-acted film of 2008, and one of the most corrosive.
Somehow the film fails to inspire more than admiration, never reaching the same heights of empathy achieved by less impeccable treatments of the same topic.
Sam Mendes's spiritually depleted film exerts an undeniable pull as its beautiful, doomed protagonists navigate the ennui of adult life. Revolutionary Road provides an apt bookend to a holiday season drenched in fatalistic gloom.
The self-dramatization is harder to capture, sometimes coming off as false moments between the actors, yet this is still a troubling story of two good people who can't live with the truth that they're as ordinary as their neighbors.
Sam Mendes, the director of Revolutionary Road, injects a few milligrams of hope into his film version of the 1961 Richard Yates novel, an excoriating portrait of a mid-1950s marriage built on sticks, straw and delusion.
Strong performances steer this 1950s marital drama out of a period-picture trap.
In pieces and in spirit, the many honest parts of this drama about marital life in the 1950s are like the rooms of a house that feel right, even if the exterior slopes somewhat clumsily.
Revolutionary Road, a waxworks edition of the furiously unsentimental novel by Richard Yates, tracks the unraveling of a handsome young suburban couple in the 1950s.
Latest News for Revolutionary Road
June 01, 2009:
RT on DVD: Defiance, Revolutionary Road, and Snakes on a Submarine
This week on DVD catch up on a few big flicks you might have missed in theaters, including an Oscar-nominated suburban period piece by Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, starring... More...
May 28, 2009:
DiCaprio and Winslet reunite for first time since Titanic as Fifties couple in crisis. ![]()
More...
January 25, 2009:
Sean Penn, Meryl Streep win at SAG awards
For the 15th year running, the Screen Actors Guild has gotten together to honor excellence among its members -- and we've reproduced the complete list of winners for the 2008... More...
January 24, 2009:
Iconoclast.com: At any moment, we expect the depressed, chain smoking gilded cage suburban house pet Kate to morph into Sylvia Plath, poised to stick her head in the oven, a premature free spirit imprisoned in a breezy hollow world. ![]()
More...
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