Revolutionary Road (2008)

This movie about a couple in the throes of marital crisis in the 1950's is strangely familiar to me. The Wheelers have turned 30, an age when you fear that you have become what you are always going to be - the potential for more than settled normality is slipping away. In desperation, they contrive to move to Paris to save themselves.

I was 31, Bjou 29 in 1974, when, after a year of marriage, we left our friends - who were having their houses and children, and our secure careers to which we were not yet irrevocably committed, and traveled the world for a year.

After four months in Asia, we lived in a house outside of Paris which belonged to Bijou’s uncle. After spending time with Bijou’s cousin and her husband and child, I wrote this in my journal:

"Last night was another with Gerard and Hélene. Being with them is an odd experience. I suppose it is what is meant by viewing another way of life. We have done a lot of that during our trip. One of the avowed purposes of the travel was to break out of our life style which we found lacking in something: maybe an environment of stimulation of growth, though I blush to use such clinical terms. We have viewed several other people who were sufficiently like us to allow us to step imaginatively into their roles and taste their wine. Some we envied, others felt superior to, all we found lacking in the final accounting, for our model.

"I guess the trouble is we do not know or cannot define what it is we really want and what we are willing to do to get it. We are naturally indecisive as individuals, and as a pair, we are both lazy and passive. Perhaps answers will come to us. We are intuitive, sensitive, bright, willing to learn and experience. We already have some answers and await, albeit impatiently, the rest."

The Wheelers also thought they deserved better than the life they had fallen into, but had neither the passion, talent, or courage to break away. April (Kate Winslet) is a failed actress, whose performance in a community production of "The Petrified Forest" as Gabrielle, the desert waitress with dreams of going to Paris begins her downfall. Now she must face the abyss of a life as a suburban housewife and mother, and all that implied in the 1950's. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) is also trapped, commuting with the other men in grey flannel suits to a stultifyingly boring office job, where the only potential for diversion is a fling with a vulnerable young secretary (Zoe Kazan) and three martini lunches.

April, without a dream of her own, tries to escape what she senses to be a life of quiet desperation, devises the Paris plan to revive what attracted her to Frank, a sense that he wanted to be better than mediocre. Frank, tragically, doesn't have the courage, and April's disppointment is fatal.

Unlike the Wheelers, we had our time in Paris and returned, ready to resume our place in the swarm, but with a far greater confidence that we were in fact different from the others. The life became one we chose, after testing many others. Our experiences sealed a bond that made us far stronger than we would have been had we never broken free.