Revolutionary Road plots another point on the graph of director Sam Mendes's steeply-declining returns--he's a stage director whose greatest weakness is his desire for little epiphanies that play like Everest off the boards, and he's guilty of too much intoxication with the medium besides. Mendes spends so much time fiddling around with his camera to a noodling Thomas Newman score that you feel like giving him some privacy. Nowhere is that propensity more troubling than in a scene of a botched abortion that plays exactly like the death of Tom Hanks in Mendes's Road to Perdition, thus demonstrating his artistic limitations at the same time that it demonstrates his complete incomprehension of the experience of miscarriage for a woman. The general misogyny of American Beauty comes into focus in this way as something troubling outside the text as well as within. (Auteurism: double-edged.)

In his revered 1961 novel, Richard Yates identifies his married antagonists Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) as seduced by the '50s' "lust for conformity." He's the lowest tier of middle-managers in corporate America and she's a fallen starlet; together they decide to pull up their roots and move to Paris on a whim. A pity that April comes up pregnant--a greater pity that devotion to Yates's brilliant, heartbreaking novel means the articulation over eggs and juice of significant chunks of his interior monologues. Winslet and DiCaprio are of course capable of carrying gravid silences just fine--the frustrating irony of movies that spend their budgets on their casts is that the expenditure is often so great as to preclude trusting those casts to do what they've been asked to do.

Chewing over admittedly rich dialogue about the choice between living authentic lives in relative bohemian poverty and inauthentic ones in suburban comfort, Mendes betrays in his objectivism this inability to truly understand what it is to choose home and children over house and material. Revolutionary Road is an ironic object: bathed in the glow of its borrowed prestige, it's a Movie with Movie Stars--stars, as it happens, of the top-grossing movie of all-time--that only comes alive when the deeply troubled son (the great Michael Shannon) of Frank and April's real estate agent (another Titanic alum, Kathy Bates) offers a glimpse at what real regret looks like in this setting instead of the mantle-loading kind. Shannon shines because he's amazing, but also because he's not saddled with the burden of being an icon--of having to issue from perfect lips late-film histrionics that absolutely do not ring true in the picture's suffocating surreality. The movie had me at moments, making the many occasions that it loses me all the more painful.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

In "Lives of Quiet Desperation: The Making of Revolutionary Road " (30 mins., 1080i), the first of two featurettes on the Blu-ray Disc, we learn that Winslet, an English major at Dartmouth in a previous life, was the primary instigator of the project, having fallen in love with the novel while pregnant with her second child. I certainly can't fault Winslet's taste nor her instincts to pursue Mendes and DiCaprio (both of whom were harder to wrangle than one might assume considering the former's her husband and the latter's her best friend), but I do hope the next time she gets knocked up she reaches for Dean Koontz instead. Kristi Zea's production design becomes the major focus of the piece--even the adorable Zoë Kazan is enlisted to talk about it rather than about her character--and I must say this microscopic view of it reveals that Mendes's austere tableaux simply didn't do it justice. The other featurette, "Richard Yates: The Wages of Truth" (26 mins., 1080i), is a compelling overview of the troubled writer's life and career courtesy Yates's daughters (who appear to range in age from 30 to 60), various friends in the publishing business, and biographer Blake Bailey. Almost all profess an intense admiration for Yates' work whilst admitting to feeling vaguely victimized by the man himself, which goes some way towards explaining why Yates's alcoholism and bipolar disorder are not only not whitewashed but may in fact be dwelled upon entirely too much. Revolutionary Road's excellent trailer (1080p) rounds out the special features, while the movie proper caps the disc in an unimpeachable 2.40:1, 1080p transfer. I found the film's colour temperature a little sickly, but I learned from the yakker that I'm supposed to, and the fine-grain image is so perfect otherwise, so natural yet so incredibly three-dimensional, that I soon adjusted to the palette anyway. The accompanying 5.1 Dolby TrueHD audio delivers Thomas Newman's score in a warm and inviting timbre and keeps the shrillness of all that screaming to a minimum.-Bill Chambers

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