Critics (and most of my friends) are calling Revolutionary Road just another would-be revolt against the sameness of suburbia, a la American Beauty. True. It rehashes that same dissatisfaction with the status quo and showcases painful coping mechanisms we erect to deal with the banality. But I don’t mind the redundancy of seeing this predicament on screen, because Revolutionary Road does rip each of us a new one — it exposes an embarassing psychological myopia in the way we all see ourselves.
The film suggests that our modern notion of exceptionalism, a conviction stroked into childrens’ egos these days by endless empty praises and meaningless celebrity-idolatry, is a farce. The inherent belief that so many of us have in some elusive sense of our own greatness is garbage. And that realization is so depressing that we drape ourselves in the trappings of an adjusted, tamer American Dream to hide our failure from the world.
So, shit, after seeing this you start to wonder if all of the dreams you’ve had for yourself are in fact these never-to-be-realized fantasies. What if after some navel-gazing you realize you’re flawed in the same plausible way that Revolutionary Road’s characters are and can’t see clearly enough to recognize your own incapacity. What if you’re a casualty of our culture’s insistence on everyone being extraordinary but all you’re really destined for is sameness, failure, mediocrity? What if there’s no point to aspiring to anything anymore?
What if, indeed.