The premiere of April’s new play has just ended and Frank looks disappointed as he moves to get her backstage. She sits there crying, her once great dreams of becoming a professional actress having just crashed. She’s a failure now, performing in a mediocre piece of amateur theatre. Frank, on his side of things, has his own share of worries. He hates his job, thinks he is a pathetic clone of his father, and wonders what the meaning of it all is. Life wasn’t meant to be this way for the Wheelers.

Driving home from the theatre, Frank invites April to talk about her distress, but the experience of having her life’s aspirations crumble is too fresh for her, and she resists. Frank, as so many men do, pushes her to open up, with the notion that he is serving her in doing so. But Frank does not know enough about women in general or his own wife in particular to understand that such tactics are forfeit. It goes awry and the ensuing chaos culminates with April’s deeply wounding questioning of Frank’s manhood. The happy life they had envisioned seems far off now.

Escaping lives of quiet desperation

For the Wheelers, life has devolved into a rote existence of make-believe. According to most people’s standards the Wheelers are a success: two beautiful children, a charming house on a hill, a stable household. But they aren’t like others. Or at least, they didn’t want to be. They were meant to be different. Frank wanted to feel things – everything – deeply. That’s what drew April to him in the first place, his deep emotional sensibilities and his yearning for truth. Now he feels nothing; he has numbed himself by suppressing his inner yearnings for too long.

Terrified of the life that awaits her, April comes up with the idea to go to Paris, a city Frank has fond memories of from his tour of duty in WWII. Frank never felt as alive as in the war, he enthusiastically tells April in one scene after Frank accepts her invitation. “This is it,” he reminisces. “This is the truth.” He lights up with the fires of passion as he reminds us that the Masculine finds true meaning only in living life on the edge of comfort and security. That is where the Masculine thrives, where its inner truths are uncovered from the murky waters of the unconscious.

With a way out in sight, everything turns around for Frank and April and their lives take on the exuberant shine of passion and hope. The people around them – friends and colleagues – react with disbelief and deny them any sort of recognition for their bravery in following their truth. Instead, they consider them to be unrealistic and naive, as is to be expected from the silent majority of people who live their lives inside cotton-clad cocoons of comfort and security. The one exception is the alleged headcase John, son of their estate-agent friend Helen. Like with so many other films I’ve looked at for this site, Revolutionary Road forces us to consider what madness really is. “Plenty of people are onto the emptiness,” John says in a flash of wisdom, “but it takes real guts to realize the hopelessness.” April and Frank are puzzled that the only person who seems to understand them is certifiably insane. April reflects on this with these words: “If being crazy means living life as if it really matters, I don’t care if I’m completely insane!”

This right here is incredibly profound and I invite you to pause here to investigate closely what John and April are onto. Are you ready to live a life of insanity?

Collapsing back into the cocoon

Frank has regained his passion and true creativity and does some stellar work for the Knox corporation. This catches the eye of CEO Bart Pollack, who has greater things in store for him. When Frank inquires with Bart about his father, a life long employee for Knox, Bart cannot remember him. He clearly didn’t leave an impression, being just one of the many faceless drones of corporate America. Frank tells Bart he’s going away, and that he cannot accept his fine offer. Bart reminds Frank that he only gets a few opportunities in life, and that he must grab them by the balls if he is to avoid becoming second rate.

So Frank changes his mind. He decides to stay, to grab those balls. It’s a mistake, and deep down he knows it. For going to Paris was the scarier choice, the one that shone bright with the radiance of truth. Taking Bart up on his offer required some pretty tiny balls. Paris required major cojones. Often in life, the scarier path is the path of truth.

April knows all is lost, and she enters a state of despair. Her husband is a coward, a little man who lets others conduct his life for him. April was so close, but now Frank’s fear has ended all hope. Frank tries to convince her that they can be happy without going to Paris, but of course it’s a lie. For it was never about Paris, it was about taking a chance of life, to tread bravely down the path less traveled. Instead, Frank slips on the shoes of the corporate drone and forfeits his soul to the hope that meaning can be found in the safe pursuits of the meaningless.

It’s about serving the world

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, it has been said. I think it must also be paved with good careers. Frank chose career over truth, fear over love, and the consequences are dramatic. The climactic scenes are to be studied, for they show how a weak man responds when he is called on his shit by his woman. April enters her dark feminine rage and lets it rip. To most men, this is insanity, but to a mature man, it is a welcome display of nature’s feminine power through the vessel of a woman. But Frank has just retired his manhood, and he cannot weather her storms. For April, life crumbled when she realized she would never know a husband who had the integrity and strength to do what he was destined for. The pain of having her husband commit this ultimate betrayal of his potential is too much for her. What happens then will not be disclosed here.

Frank failed to ask the questions, “What destiny am I here to fulfill? How can I serve the world perfectly in my pursuit of what I was born to do?” These questions raise the bar. Let Revolutionary Road remind you that playing it small and safe in life is hurting yourself, your loved ones, and the entire world. What’s at stake here is life itself. And taking a chance on life requires big cojones.

I suggest you watch Revolutionary Road with your woman. It may turn out to be quite a journey. Find out about your journey to Paris that you never took. Talk about what taking it now could do for your relationship.

Harry meets his buddy Richard in a fancy restaurant, eager to share important news about his life. He is going to leave Patricia. He has found someone else. He wants to “be happy”, he says, and “all Pat wants is sex”. Harry thinks there is more to marriage than sex – he wants affection and cuddling. He wants to give. Pat just wants the sex. Bit of a role reversal for you there.

Kay enters in all her glory, and Richard asks himself why on earth a girl like her would fall for a guy like Harry. We understand that although Richard likes his friend very much, he is well aware that he is a bit of a bore.

As things evolve, Richard becomes increasingly obsessed with Kay. He wants her. He thinks about her all the time. Harry does too of course. In fact, he is preparing for his new life with Kay, scheming to find a way to get out with the least amount of noise. Harry sees his wife as a fragile soul who would break down completely were he to leave her. Harry doesn’t like to see people suffer, he tells Richard, so he hatches the plan to…kill her.

This plan is all based on his total ineptitude at understanding who his wife is. He has succumbed to the compromise of marriage, the drudgery of suburbian comforts, and now he feels trapped. He wants out.

Dark secrets behind the pleasant facade

The story Harry tells himself about not wanting people to suffer is basically self-deluded nonsense. It’s his own suffering he is afraid of, and as he is a coward, he cannot own up to it, and instead projects it onto Patricia with the intent of ending “her” misery. He has no clue.

This situation is an extreme version of a common masculine pathology: By failing to own up to their own vulnerability, many men play games, live in little fantasy worlds where others are in the wrong, where the others are the fragile or “evil” ones. The passive aggressive man creates a little cushion for himself, where he can sit comfortably and judge and misinterpret others from within the comforts of his own mind. There is no chance of being brought on trial for it in the “real world”. That is the prerogative of the passive aggressive man. It is why Harry is happy seeing the world from that perspective. It’s why many men are.

Unbeknownst to Richard, Harry moves ahead with his plan. And unbeknownst to Harry, Richard is maneuvering to take Kay from him. He does so on the basis of his life philosophy “You cannot build the unhappiness upon the unhappiness of someone else.” The question Richard eventually asks himself, to his credit, is if his hunt for Kay makes him a hypocrite. Richard is slightly more of a man than Harry, but just barely. He too is a coward, who cannot come clear with his friend about his true intentions and his true feelings about Harry’s betrayal of Pat. This is unfortunate, for the raw and brutal honesty of true male friendship would clear up the act of both of these guys. Alas, they don’t have true friendship, true brotherhood. What they have is a functional agreement about spending comfortable time together while sharing mildly pleasant conversation. Sound familiar?

When Richard discovers that Pat too is unfaithful, with a young and vigorous author named John, he is given the opportunity to come clear with them both, to, as he puts it, “set them free”. A surge of happiness rises in him, but Richard cannot utter the words. He has already started weaving the web of deceit to get Kay and now he has castrated himself with his inability to handle life head on. He falls flat on his face, impotent, afraid of life.

Tear down lies and pretense in your friendships

Because Richard didn’t man up, Harry’s plan progresses. Here is where we see how the inability of a guy to be a true and honest friend to his buddy can cause dramatic results. The mechanics of this particular plot may seem unrealistic and over the top, but not so much. For in truth, every time you give or receive lies with no remorse, you are failing your duty as a true friend and as a man. You are committing treachery against yourself, your buddy, truth, life itself. Often these opportunities to come totally clear with life arise several times every day. But many have been so numbed by living a life of subtle dishonesty that they think it’s normal. So they will happily see a friend fuck himself up without intervening. Now there’s such a thing as adapting to circumstances, not always having to strip others bare, but the capacity should be developed.

Finding yourself by losing everything

Richard, the dick that he is (pun intended), takes his plan to its fruition and steals Kay. In a sense, there is something right about it, as they are a better match, but it was a covert operation. Harry crumbles when he catches them red handed, and utters with tears in his eyes “I lost everything today.” Serves him right in a way, as we see from the scene previously. There he looks at Kay with puppy eyes and serves her the most agonizing line “Oh, I love you so much Kay. Nothing scares me when I’m with you”. There is nothing wrong in being a sensitive and romantic soul. Nothing at all. It is a beautiful thing. But expecting your intimate partner to be happy being your mother as opposed to your lover is totally unacceptable. What a treachery of her feminine core! What a treachery of your masculine potential! What a big waste of a man.

Anyway, as we were saying, he has lost everything: Kay, his buddy Richard, perhaps also his wife – who is about to drink the poison he so compassionately prepared for her. All of a sudden, ridding himself of Pat isn’t quite as tempting a prospect for Harry, and fortunately, when he arrives home, she is not dead. The gravity of his almost-murder finally hits him, and he realizes that he’d be lost without Pat. Having found no true freedom in himself, he needs a woman to mother him through the rough waters of life. He almost killed his “mom”.

Conclusion

The movie ends on a bit of a bullshit note – everybody being happy and everything forgotten. This speaks to the release of truth that has happened for these people, especially for Harry, and the increased clarity it has brought them. But the karmic patterns here are not gone, not until all truths have been revealed. Some have been, but not all, and they never will be of course. So happiness will never be truly theirs. How many lies are we willing to accept as foundation stones in our lives? That’s for you to find out.