Mar 01, 2009 07:02 PM
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The monotony of everyday lives is skillfully depicted by Leo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet in the Revolutionary Road. The main two characters are a successful young couple, the husband in a respectable white collar job, the wife an able homemaker with two kids.
They are a couple the society admires and have achieved the materialistic barometers of success – house, car, kids, money. Yet they have an emptiness which has crept in their lives after doing the same mundane things over and over again.
The wife suffers and thinks about their future. She tries to convince her husband to leave everything and go to Paris where the wife could get a well to do job as ‘they pay secretaries in government agencies good’ and the husband can do whatever he wants and can discover his goal in life.
Frank Wheeler (Dicaprio) is successful in his job. He hates it because he is doing the same what his father did for the same old company (Knoxx Bussiness Machines) for twenty years. He even has a physical fling with one of the secretaries at his office and later confesses the same to his wife. But when a stupendous opportunity for promotion comes to him he is lured out of his wife’s plan to go to Paris as they pay is huge and his wife is pregnant at the time.
April Wheeler (Winslet) is lonely, maybe confused in mind, more confused than her rational husband. She is all along euphoric about her decision to go to Paris and can do anything even the destroy the baby she has in her womb to be a part of the Parisian life. Her boredom eventually successfully puts strain in her relationship with her husband, even at one point of time she confesses that she wouldn’t mind if her husband has slept with someone because that is something not of her concern anymore.
The shock of the decision of the husband to not to go Paris makes the wife more confused even to the point she has sex with their common friend (also their neighbor). The inconsolable grief rages in April and the couple have a fight, brilliantly and naturally portrayed by the lead pair. The indecisiveness of what to do next makes April to try an abortion, ultimately killing herself.
This film adaptation is from the novel of the same name from the 1950’s. The complexities of marital relationship are the prime focus of the plot. The subjects are mature but even though they are able to create the fictional space in their relationship in which the ego of the individuals step in and start to play spoilsport. The films take its own pace to tell the story. It’s slow, and hence it can captivate the viewer into the boredom of the lives of the couple to convey its message.
The truth holds even today in relationships, and day to day lives of all. Am sure even our young and upswing urbane junta is facing their own trails and tribulations in their own way, everyone is achieving the materialistic yardsticks of success very early in their lives, we are living the American age, but we may succeed more because the emptiness that the Wheeler’s suffered could have been trickled down if they could have got a little spiritual and looked to God rather looking to Paris. As our philosophy says Happiness is within. Finally thanks to PVR for having the Oscar festival and screening the major Oscars winners for a week.
