Revolutinoary Road (2008)

BBC 2, director Sam Mendes, adapted from a novel by Richard Yates. I’ll come clean. I haven’t read the novel. Shame on me. I’m putting it in the first 100 must read novels and to the front of the queue of the 6 752 should read novels. The last time Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslett were together Celine Dion was standing backstage warbling her heart must go on and on and on and on. And it did. Racking up millions of sales and making Titanic one of the most watched…I’m bored even thinking about it. Revolutionary Road is not Titanic. It’s 1955 for one thing and not 1912. There’s no ships in sight. America has won two world wars and if there’s a third it will win that as well. It’s the Eisenhower years. The richest and militarily strongest nation the world has ever witnessed is at its peak. Where then does the Wheeler’s angst, Frank and April, living the white, middle-class, suburban dream, with the perfect house and the perfect boy and girl family, spring from? It comes from recognition of the phoniness of the live they are living. April wants to jump ship and move to Paris and live a real life. Frank buys into her dream, her vision. They think they can do it, unshackle themselves for commuter land and commitments. Frank gets offered a big promotion. April gets pregnant. In the background is John, a Phd in Maths and a position in the madhouse, his brain fried. He’s the truth teller. He tells April and Frank he’s glad of one thing: that he’s not going to be that kid of theirs when it’s born. And so it turns out. No winners only losers. The movie should have ended with Frank running, running, running away from the hospital in which May dies after a botched abortion. It doesn’t, it carries on and on and on…