Kate Winslet has grown up to be one of the major talents of our generation, and in Revolutionary Road she joins the ranks of icons such as Giulietta Masina, Monica Vitti and Ingrid Bergman – all famous for delivering some of their best performances under the critical eye of their partners. Sam Mendes allows us to penetrate the inner depths of his wife’s talent, showing that behind the physical strength there lies an intelligent soul, able to regenerate itself through its vulnerability.

Revolutionary Road, based on Richard Yates’ celebrated novel, is a story of a young couple struggling to make a life that is both prosperous and, above all, meaningful. The Wheelers (played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio) are living in the mid-1950s Connecticut suburbia, comfortably, like all their neighbours. Every morning, Frank gets up, puts his hat on, gets in his car, arrives at the train station, takes the train to the town centre, arrives at his office desk, lights a cigarette, and painstakingly waits for the day to finish. Meanwhile, April wakes up, prepares the breakfast for her two children and husband, does the washing, the laundry, sits uncomfortably through a neighbour’s visit, and then continues the housework dreaming that the day will come to an end.

The day does come to end for both, and their short communal life lights up for a few hours. Then, they are like young lovers on a first date. They rediscover each over through dreams they share,  touches that they crave for, through the love that binds them together. Night after night, day after day, Pandora’s Box is emptying, and eventually they are left only with remorse for living a live that has no dreams, no passion, no real meaning beyond the settled idea of continuing the reproductive burden of the human animal.

The Wheelers are at the crossroads of history. Shadowed by the generation that struggled through a massive recession and a disastrous world war, they are the ones who finally enjoy the fruits of stability. What they fight for maintaining is not their struggle, but their parents’. What dreams do they have, though? What novel dreams does the country they live in have? Money is as old as the social history of man. Peace and stability are the necessities for a community to survive.

April wants to move to Paris to start a new life where she is the one who caters financially for her family, whilst her husband takes the time to discover his real metier. As if by chance, their monotony is interrupted that summer. They plan; happy to discover suddenly something that potentially has meaning. But something tells us that one day, that dream will end, and they will both wake up to their ‘ugly’ comfort. Just like an entire nation, they find that dreams exist no longer, that being truthful to oneself is nothing but a chimera. As long as everybody continues their live, progress will happen, yet not through conflict, but through the mechanisation of their being – a process that leaves them no choices, no decision power, and most definitely no individual sense of direction.

Sam Mendes returns to known territory, previously explored in American Beauty (1999). Just as the Burnhams are struggling to find essence in the midst of a mundane prosperous existence in Mendes’ generation of the mid-1990s, so were the Wheelers trying to find a fresh breath of air forty years back. In both films, a nation has found peace and stability ten years after a period of agony. The characters sense that unless radical change is to take place, this stability will lead to the utter loss of their identity by the time the storm arrives. Looking backwards, both Yates and Ball ended up witnessing their prophecy with the start of the Cold War and respectively the lasting effect of the Bush administration.

In retrospect, Mendes’ choice to direct Revolutionary Road now is precisely the recognition that the wheel of history is turning, and the children eventually re-live their parents’ life. Yet, the horror of the film is subtler. April’s revolution is not only a failure of her generation, but also a damnation for the one to follow. Yes, her eventual choice seems to her as the only escape from this ‘hopeless emptiness’. She thinks that choice belongs entirely to her, that it is novel in its incarnation. What we see is that this very choice is preconditioned by the society she denies. If her desire to move to Paris feels more of an attempt to reconcile the conflict between needs and desires (despite its obvious dream-like tapestry), the film’s closing act is nothing but a recognition on our side that the character has lost the ability to identify what her desires are in the first place.

The key element we need to consider though, is we should not take the acts themselves as expressions of the film’s meaning. We should be concerned with how the characters arrive at these acts. Looking from this point of view, the ‘hopeless emptiness’, April alludes to, is found precisely in the psyche of the generation, irrespective whether the individuals are conformists or radicals. The problem is that the Wheelers are the empty shell, remnants of a meaningful past of which they have no recollection. Their fight then is useless from the very outset, for it lacks any foundation.

The dénouement of Revolutionary Road is somewhat reminiscent of Zvyagintsev’s Izgnanie [The Banishment] (2007). In both cases, the same choice of the leading female protagonists leads to a reaffirmation of the dark emptiness their soul witnesses in their daily lives. For both April and Vera, the future is sacrificed by the need to have a better future.

The difficult task for Mendes is delivering a convincing work which allows us to identify this horror, based on the extent to which his actors can reproduce such psychological states without overtly expressing the meaning behind them. Winslet and DiCaprio prove fit for the task. Winslet, in particular, is undergoing through such a powerful experience that eventually she looses herself in the role completely. What she achieves is not character incarnation, but transcendence. Her acting can be most closely defined as the very act of being. And, hence, it is not surprising that we find the film’s essence primarily in her character.

Revolutionary Road is arguably a portrait of a generation that was struggling to escape conformism, but the film’s key power lies in its construction. Mendes created a work that is concerned with the human’s inability to understand oneself. In times of conflict, this incapacity is less meaningful as we always have strong immediate concerns that occupy our time. However, when we manage to satisfy those concerns, and we are forced to relax and look backwards at what we achieved in order to plan our dreams, we realise that we have no answer to: ‘Who am I?’ For portraying this struggle on screen, Mendes deserves all the accolades.