Unapologetically expressive storytelling isn’t always easy to take, but it can be a powerful experience. Based on the Richard Yates novel, Revolutionary Road is such an experience. 
The difficulty of the story – a suburban couple’s short lived yearning for a more fulfilling life – shouldn’t be overplayed. It’s not as if this is a film which must be suffered through in order to place it one the mantle of one-time-only films (like, say, Lylia 4-Ever or Funny Games). However, one can easily be left with the question, as I was, of what purpose the novel and film serve, what growth or transformation, no matter how small, one is meant to experience by traveling so deeply and directly into the dark heart of post-industrial malaise.
I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I can say that if you have to be part of this post-mortem examination, it helps for the experience to be visually beautiful. Roger Deakins is true master of the cinematograph, one of a handful of magicians who can take your breath away without calling undue attention away from the story. There is a particular shot in Revolutionary Road, about three-quarters of the way through, in which Kate Winslet’s April Wheeler approaches the picture window in their house, in a stupor of depression, guilt, and (as it turns out) true physical distress. She is cloaked in an austere, otherworldly light, and reflected in the panes is what should be the idyllic world that surrounds her. What follows is anything but, and it is a moment of peerless cinematic craft.
Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio turn in impressive performances while inhabiting difficult characters. Difficult not in the same way that the subject matter is difficult, but in the sense that April and Frank Wheeler aren’t real characters, but players in a modern parable, meant express a subset of human emotion in order to permit the audience to observe, perhaps to the point of strain, certain aspects of society. In that same regard, Michael Shannon (whose turn as the mentally unstable John Givings was Oscar-nominated) has the even greater task of being both a player in the parable and the proxy for Yates himself. If ever the extra features on a DVD enhanced the experience of a film, the documentary about the life and personality of Yates included with Revolutional Road is required and welcome viewing.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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