GENTLE SPOILERS WITHIN — READ WITH CAUTION
Fear of change, fear of risk.
“If you don’t try anything, you can’t fail,” she tells him, striking at the heart of what has him so afraid of uprooting their family to Paris in the hopes of a better way of life. Frank Wheeler is terrified of change, but his wife April longs for it. She needs change to survive as a person, as a wife, believing, wrongly perhaps (perhaps not), that change will help her marriage and better define her place in it.
The characters in “Revolutionary Road” are in agonizing pain as they go about their daily lives, each trying to keep their marriage intact while also trying to live out their dreams. Deep down, they must know their dreams have to be sacrificed to a degree. Way down in their gut, they must know their dreams may never come true, and it is quietly destroying them.
Is “Revolutionary Road” a classic American film destined to be remembered for decades to come? Or is it merely an over-praised, depressing work that will be forgotten once it hits DVD, a bizarre blip on the careers of the creators? I tend to believe the former. It is a sublime work of art and a demanding piece of cinema that takes audiences on a difficult journey through a rocky relationship that, for me, resembles the young years of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
