Disregard Mr. DiCaprio; I am much happier with Ms. Winslet.
I read the novel (Revolutionary Road) about a year and a half ago, although I have yet to see the film. It was one of my more satisfying reads that year, and well-timed; we were only just discussing Existentialism in class.
The book, probably needless to say, was great. I could imagine why some would dislike it - to be blunt, it's pretty much pessimistic as hell (think a less qirky, less ironic American Beauty) - but there was a definite truth to it, and I could actually relate to the struggles of Frank and April Wheeler, on some level or another. The book is almost like a study on the detrimental effects of conformity on your personality, but to say it's just about conformity is doing the book a big disservice. It's much more than just that. It's also about what happens when you let go of your dreams, about why we stop trying to reach out to the people around us. Conformity acts almost as a backdrop instead of the major theme. We all know the horrors of the dreaded "C" word, and its suppression of individuality, its suffocating qualities, etc. Rev Road takes it a level further. Frank and April become too scared to return to their "true" selves, possibly because, as they come to realize, they never liked their true selves in the first place. There's almost nothing to fall back on, because ultimately, their relationship is grounded in lies and dreams that were never reached. Now that's suffocation.
The ending - SPOILER ALERT (sort of) - seems to represent this in a most literal way. The shock of it kind of threw me off at first, but looking back, it's about the dispruption of life. April tries bringing control back into her life at the cost of another, and cannot.
