After reading and loving the book Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) I just couldn’t wait to see the movie. Especially with Kate Winslet starring in it. I have to confess that I knew who would be playing the leads in the film and already envisioned their faces while reading. The book is absolutely fantastic. I was astounded at the way Richard Yates described feelings and situations. He created a very real environment and makes readers feel like they are right there in the New York suburbs.

April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) move to the suburbs to raise their children, even though they really fancy themselves to be city folks. They always feel like they are special, above the other people around them. This is the thought they cling to while drifting more and more into becoming a typical suburban couple. When April sees no way out, she convinces Frank that they should fulfill their dream and move to Paris in order to become who they are really meant to be.

I hesitate to call this a love story, it is really a story about hate. April and Frank not only start detesting each other but also themselves. Both of them are unhappy with their situation and their lives, which makes them incredibly miserable and they take it out on each other even though they still seem to care for one another. They even want the same things in life but they just can’t get it together because they are blaming each other for there sorrow.

The movie is very good, even after reading the book, but the book (as it is always the case) offers so many more details about what the characters are feeling and thinking that I felt the movie didn’t really convey the entire story. I had a feeling that people who hadn’t read the book couldn’t possibly know what was going on.

What I thought was most striking about the story is how easily I could identify with the characters and how much I did not want to do so. I guess that most people feel that they are somewhat special and not many actually do fulfill their dreams in the end. Even though April and Frank are in a completely different situation from mine, I still saw an awful lot of me in them. And I think this is really the beauty of storytelling, to make the reader or viewer feel what it is like to be in the story, and Richard Yates certainly succeeded in this.

Even though it is a painful film to watch, I absolutely recommend it. It is set in the fifties but it is dealing with a modern topic of a couple growing angry at the realization of not being special or who they thought they would be. I don’t think I have ever seen a film with quite the same subject matter. It goes unsaid that the acting in this film is phenomenal.

Revolutionary Road really deserves to get a MovieCat Award for having and outstanding cast perform an unusual and at the same time very ordinary story.