From director Sam Mendes ( American Beauty ) comes a searing portrait of a marriage at war with itself.
:
Sam Mendes, fresh off American Beauty and Road to Perdition , utilizes a precise, theatrical visual style. The camera often lingers on windows and doors, framing the characters as if they are trapped in a dollhouse they cannot escape.
The final scenes are perhaps the most chilling. We see the neighborhood gossip, Milly Campbell, retelling the Wheelers' story to her husband. She edits out the tragedy, the pain, and the nuance, reducing their lives to a piece of juicy gossip. Her husband, sitting in his chair, asks her to turn the TV down. The cycle continues. The silence returns. The revolution is over before it began.
There is no car crash in Revolutionary Road . No screaming detectives, no smoking gun. And yet, Sam Mendes’s adaptation of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel is one of the most harrowing horror films ever made—because the monster is the American Dream.
