Revolutionary Road

Kendra, a good friend I met in The Netherlands, is back in town for a few weeks, and to kickstart our reunion (which has been happening more or less every few months or so for the past year), we did what we always do: go see a movie. Having seen a few movies together in the NL while I was on my unlimited movie-going pass, it only made sense that we would continue the tradition here, despite having to pay an arm and a leg for movies these days.

Anyway, our first movie of this visit was Revolutionary Road, the new Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet film set in the suburbs of the 1950's. To be honest, I wasn't really that excited about seeing this film: I generally don't like Kate Winslet and thought this film would be too much of a retread of 2006's Little Children (also starring Winslet), but while there were similarities between the two films, I think I actually ended up liking Revolutionary Road better. The sense of estrangement between the two lead characters is so much more pronounced in this film, and a few of the more intense scenes really drive home pretty hard (especially those with Michael Shannon's unbalanced character John).

Perhaps the biggest strength of this film, for me at least, was that its characters were going through a few dilemmas which I myself have either recently been through or am currently experiencing, all of which obviously helped me get into the story that much more. By contrast, Little Children's characters' problems are palpable but a bit hard for me to relate to, as they concern (almost exclusively) the strain of living in the suburban child-raising quagmire.

Anyway, more props to Leo and Kate: despite my tendency to repeatedly doubt how captivating they'll end up being in a film, they've proven themselves once more. As this was the best film I've seen in the theatre since Milk, it's definitely worth checking out if it interests you at all.