THE ROAD LESS TAKEN, PILLS MUST BE PRESCRIBED

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
By Sam Mendes

I must have had a very different set of expectations going into REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. Perhaps I’d anticipated a far more refined and calibrated melodrama along the lines of the methodical ROAD TO PERDITION. Instead, what I experienced, while still very powerful, was a raw and draining exploration of people on the cusp of desperation. Experimental in style and dark in tone, Sam Mendes’ latest shares a commonality with his earlier AMERCIAN BEAUTY, another subversive study of suburbanites on the edge. It also teams beautifully - if that’s even the word – with the underlying dystopic visions mutually aligned with the previous works of David Lynch.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, too, is a brooding film offering up quite a challenge to its viewers. For those who can stomach the discomfort of stifling ennui there is a worthy payoff even if a dreadful one. Certainly veering off from the mainstream, Mendes challenges much of Hollywood’s expected conventions of how a film is written, structured and presented.

But REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, more so than ever, belongs to Kate Winslet, wife of the director, who benefits greatly in a superbly excruciating performance. Here by virtue of her enduring suffocation, she offers an explorative and liberating performance, an electrifying one that is even different from what we are generally used to seeing the gifted actress do. In terms of bait, LITTLE CHILDREN has nothing on this film. Here, on REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, Winslet’s emotions are by far more stark naked than ever before. She brilliantly combines notions of both pathos and misplaced hope through the twinkle and squint of an eye. Hers is, by far, my favourite performance of 2008.


Yet in all irony [as it should be], ROAD’s overall feel is purely neon-lights theatrical. Even as Mendes sets his actors, including a solid Leonardo DiCaprio [who, while co-starring, unfortunately pales by comparison] and a plucky fun Kathy Bates, for stagy confrontations [and you can be sure that the film will engage you with its theatrics] the film is nonetheless designed to highlight Winslet calculatingly walking across the screen, as if in some separate bi-polar dream state of disbelief. Winslet’s April Wheeler sleepwalks through at times but then manically jump starts [and restarts] the film’s stumbling rhythms, trying to find her way off stage – to escape the doldrums of her phoney existence. She’s made to seem conflicted in her detachment, sharing a glimmer of hope, here and there, while coping with an uncompromising oppressive reality. It is truly a study of madness unravelled and coming apart at so many seams.

For a film featuring such leading actors as DiCaprio and Winslet [in a reunion, no less], Mendes’ latest is quite a daring, unconventional film choice. Targeted as serious adult fare, I can either see this film overly impressing its unsuspecting audiences awed by its cautionary tone or completely turning them off by its sheer [and, to some, preposterous] dreariness. I, for one, enjoyed it – although I can guarantee you that I did not walk out with a big smile on my face. While I did get myself all wrapped up in Mendes’ morbid twist of familial drama, my first reaction was to call my mom and not recommend the film. For cinema lovers and the twisted only.