Revolutionary Road: Best DVDs of May 2009

 What it is:  Revolutionary Road, based on the Richard Yates novel of the same name, is the story of April and Frank Wheeler, a couple of pseudo-bohemians who stumble, quite unfortunately, into a wholly mismatched marriage and a far from idyllic life in suburban Connecticut in the 1950’s.  Their feelings of being different, of possessing a certain specialness that separates them from their neighbors and their chosen life, drives their decision to leave it all behind and move to Paris.  They aren’t snobs exactly, or foolish, just people who fell into the life they thought they were supposed to want.  It wasn’t.

Why it’s Significant: Do like your love stories with a lot of yelling, woeful moments of dreams crushed to dust and devastatingly realistic decisions made by people with a total inability to understand one another?  This isn’t a happily ever after story and it’s certainly not the satisfyingly blissful reunion of Jack and Rose some may have hoped for.  Revolutionary Road is at times a bleak and dreary film, but it is also a beautiful one, brilliantly realized by director Sam Mendes and featuring performances so stunning from both DiCaprio and Winslet that I’m willing to bet I’ll endure the pain a few more times, just to again experience each of these impressive actors at the absolute top of their game. –Kira