“Revolutionary Road” is a bad movie. Who could have guessed that it would be?
The movie replaces character with plot, and the result lands with a wet flop. It tells the story of Revolutionary Road and makes us see how thin the plot is: Self-identified creative souls must escape suburbia; maybe Paris would be nice; pregnancy is an unwelcome surprise. With the constant emphasis on what happens next, the audience is reduced to being spectators of fights and sex, dreams and dissolution. Interesting stuff, maybe, but it’s their stuff, not ours. We’ll never know these people; they’re not us.
Movies are about plot and plotless movies are boring. Novels are about internal states and internal states are hard to do in a movie.
But “Revolutionary Road” is book about narcissistic twits who can’t seem to recognize that fact. Short of parody, that will make for a bad movie.