Movies...Revolutionary Road

I've been watching a fair number of movies the past couple of weeks. Have been thinking I should write something, NOT a review, about them. So here goes nothing...

Revolutionary Road : Cast - Kate Winslet; Leonardo DiCaprio
Adapted from a novel by Richard Yates, this Sam Mendes movie stars "Kate and Leo", as a sub-urban couple. Part of a conventional society, Kate, an aspiring-actress-turned-suburban-mom, feels stifled and longs to break out and chase a dream. The problem - Leo, who it turns out, no longer wants to run with her. Thats putting it simplistically...actually he does agree to give it all up and move to Paris, and they spend couple of months in pleasurable anticipation. Leo enjoys shocking the neighbourhood but not his colleagues ribbing him about being a "kept" man. Kate, thrills at the prospect of being unconventional, booking tickets with enthusiasm, learning French, planning a secretarial job. Pregnancy, a promotion on the job, put the brakes on this plan, forcing the couple to assess their motivations, resulting in tragic consequences.
Kate Winslet is superb, as the young girl, who got lost in the wife and mother. We realise early on, she doesn't have the talent, but she doesn't ask herself this question - perhaps the answer is too obvious to bear. She struggles to assuage the guilt he heaps on her - "You are a mother, how can you think of abortion?". Hunted down by conventions, strangled by routine, smacked in the face by life's surprises, she fights and struggles and kicks, only to hurt herself.
Leo DiCaprio is effortlessly good, as the husband, who sees his wife, his love, going off the deep end, destroying herself and them, and is helpless to arrest it. He can't understand her struggle, he doesn't want to! He asks the question so many men have asked their vagrant wives, "Why can't you be happy, like the rest of us?". They have a house, kids, money, sex- what more would a woman want?! He fights the distance she puts between them, only to lose and find comfort with another.
This is one movie where the fights are real, screaming, gut-wrenching! Sam Mendes shows what many of us have seen, a marriage unravelling. Lovers turn strangers, children turn burdens and society turns into a millstone. Kate Winslet pleads with her husband "Please...Please ...tell me we can have this child in Paris", even as she knows he can't/won't. The only person who seems to make "sense" of this situation, is the psychologically ill, returned-from-san neighbour. Perhaps that pushes her over the brink - insanity seems to be her only living refuge.