Revolutionary Road

There is a scene, about 3/4s of the way through, involving a hand on a car window during a moment of passion that reminded me of Titanic. Except it's more like a reversal of that moment, or better yet a desperate attempt to reclaim something like passion.

One wonders how sympathetic we are to feel towards these characters. When I was trying to explain to a friend an odd theme in the movie I said that they were caught playing a role even when they didn't want to. He remarked that the self-awareness must be like another role itself, ad infinitum.

I think that "ad infinitum" actually captures exactly what I was thinking. To use a wildly pretentious phrase, it's the "infinity of boredom"--the "emptiness and hopelessness" as it's said in the movie. Even the despair is a hollow put-on, a show more than substance. And so that "emptiness" escapes from a simplistic attack on suburban tedium to become something much larger, much more intrusive and threatening for the audience. Something we can't condescend to (which the audience I saw it with seemed eager to do--as if things happening in the 50s are funny just by virtue of being in the 50s!). There would seem to be no way out, no way to be real, to "really feel things" as Frank puts it. The true tragedy of the story becomes evident in their descriptions of what "really feeling things" would be, it's either cliched or vague and undefined. Soon it becomes obvious that they've never really felt anything at all. Even their means of escape (dashing off to France, a banal cliche to everyone who hears it) is somehow staged, phony, just another example of bad acting...