Dream Deferred: Revolutionary Road, Far From Heaven, and All That Heaven Allows

This past weekend I saw Revolutionary Road, a period piece depicting the life of a young married couple dwelling in suburban Connecticut in the mid-1950s, at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

Revolutionary Road reminded me very much of two other films: All That Heaven Allows (made in 1955 in Technicolor and set in an unnamed small town in New England) and Far From Heaven (also set in 1950s suburban Connecticut, and made in 2002 in the style of and as an homage to other 1950s films, particularly All That Heaven Allows and other films directed by Douglas Sirk).

All That Heaven Allows is somewhat clichéd in its plotting and dialogue, but critics who decry the "happy ending" as facile or relenting are not looking at the work as a whole, and the admirable dispersal of its gentle subversive power within the context of the social mores it critiques. (The contemporaneous New York Times movie review published February 29, 1956 dismissively refers to All That Heaven Allows as "frankly feminine fiction," which from the context is clearly meant to be an insult.)

Whereas All That Heaven Allows "allows" its protagonists to be united at the end (the studio required a "happy ending" as a condition to making it), Far From Heaven is a bleaker film, in which one protagonist's (Dennis Quaid) future is left largely uncertain, and the relationship between the other two (Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert) comes to an end when Haysbert literally pulls out of the train station to take a different life path. Although All That Heaven Allows is the inspiration and progenitor of Far From Heaven, the shared context and rich intertextuality only add to each film's individual beauty and merits.

Although Revolutionary Road does not take its stylistic cues from Sirk, it feels like kin to these two films, as it too explores the vast distance between the meticulously maintained projection of the American Dream onto the lives of supposed nonconformists in a conformist society, and the inner turmoil that lies just beneath, sometimes simmering just below the surface and sometimes boiling over into rage and venom.

Kathy Bates is pitch-perfect as Helen, the perfectly ordinary real estate agent who sells the home on Revolutionary Road to April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) Wheeler. Winslet and DiCaprio are astonishing, taking us on an emotional tour de force – with fits and stops in between: from bruised optimism and utter heartbreak to seething anger and detached enervation – that weaves together and then unravels the lies we tell ourselves and one another to appear happy; to rationalize the abandonment of our dreams; and ultimately, to live or to die.

However, it is Helen's crazy son, John (Michael Shannon), who steals the show, not in the sense that he upstages Winslet and DiCaprio (though, his performance is just as worthy of an Academy Award), but in the sense that it is he alone who sees through the picture-perfect façade the Wheelers have managed to create to convince everyone but themselves that, while they might not always be happy living a dull suburban life, they generally are, and in any case they are at least better than those around them who have bought into the fiction of such happiness. In doing so, he veers to-and-fro from pointed questioning to monologue to haunting near-soliloquy, wildly and yet methodically crafting a canvas where reason and unreason, sanity and madness, brilliance and pathology, all blur together.

It is an actor's film, in that not only do DiCaprio, Winslet and Shannon offer technically brilliant performances that bring their characters to life in all their intimate details, in turn illuminating their very imperfect humanity, they also reveal how for so many of us life itself has come to mean acting – acting out; not acting out; acting like we don't care; at times, actively and inactively refusing to admit to ourselves that we are acting; as we continue to act – always still playing a role.

These three films are about risk and opportunity cost; about the things we buy into and the compensation we seek; and the price we all pay – sooner or later; one time or many; with money or in time lost or sometimes even with our lives – on life's journey. Whether we take the road less traveled, or the road everyone else seems to be on, it's not a question of if we pay, it's only a question of how we pay - in money, in time, in love, in honesty - what currency we use, how we compensate ourselves and compensate for the choices we've made, how we value our lives.

I love Revolutionary Road's parting shot. In its recognition that even when we can't change the channel we can always tune out, in ways big and small, it provides a barely translucent glimmer of hope to encapsulate the beautiful, sad and perhaps bitter pill that life becomes when we will or yen it to be so.