DreamWorks Pictures' critically acclaimed romantic drama Revolutionary Road starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (in her Golden Globe Best Actress-winning performance) will be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas starting March 11.
Adapted from the landmark novel by Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road is an incisive portrait of an American marriage seen through the eyes of Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet). Yates' story of 1950's America poses a question that has been reverberating through modern relationships ever since: can two people break away from the ordinary without breaking apart?
Frank and April have always seen themselves as special, different, ready and willing to live their lives based on higher ideals. So, as soon as they move into their new house on Revolutionary Road, they proudly declare their independence from the suburban inertia that surrounds them and determine never to be trapped by the social confines of their era.
Yet for all their charm, beauty and irreverence, the Wheelers find themselves becoming exactly what they didn't expect: a good man with a routine job whose nerve has gone missing; a less-than-happy homemaker starving for fulfillment and passion; an American family with lost dreams, like any other.
Driven to change their fates, April hatches an audacious plan to start all over again, to leave the comforts of Connecticut behind for the great unknown of Paris. But when the plan is put in motion, each spouse is pushed to extremes—one to escape whatever the cost, the other to save all that they have, no matter the compromises.
Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) was drawn to the material as a searing, raw portrait of a marriage in both its most tender and tumultuous moments, exploring the ways in which the outcome and the dynamics of a romance can be as unfair as they are liberating. "What I saw in this story was the potential to explore a marriage laid out in detail—all the hard edges, the vulnerability, the cruelty, the rage and raw emotionality," he says. "Sometimes a couple who want to be together, who feel they should be together, can't make it work. The audience's feelings about Frank and April become as conflicted and mysterious as our feelings about relationships and life in general."
Mendes also had in mind his key cast early on—envisioning Leonardo DiCaprio to join Kate Winslet in the roles of Frank and April, believing they could evoke at once the tenderness of the couple's love and the toxicity of their illusions about one another.
"Leo and Kate have known each other since they were 20 years old. They know each other's foibles and they can't pretend to be something they're not with each other," explains Mendes. "There's a level of honesty with them, a sense of mutual support and also a kind of testing of each other. Above and beyond that, they have that quality where two plus two equals five—when you put the two of them together, there's another thing that emerges."
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