Suburbia is the fat cat hummer squashing the living daylight out of its gifted and talented roadkill.  Splatch!  There goes another would be creative, extinguished by marriage, babies and the two car garage.  In the film, talking, dreaming, screaming, sobbing, fornication - nothing re-inflates the squashed casualties of a cloying culture.

Artists have bucked expectations through time, but there's a dull throbbing from our gut that wants to fool us with impossibilities.  We are tempted, along with every human breathing, to want to have it all - creative freedom and the peaceable kingdom of shady lawns and frolicking offspring.  The myth of this kingdom is that it costs next to nothing and leaves its subjects vast open space to generate strange new ideas of exquisite beauty and deep sensitivity.  Not so, remands the gawky kid, the work-worn spouse, the tax collector and the shrink.  Emotional cost is under reported in the sleek brochures that lure us into weddings and beyond.

Revolutionary Road tells that part of the story well, but what to do with the ripped open wound?  At one point, Frank tells April, 'We can be happy here, I promise.' - and we almost believe him.  We want to rise above the constraints of our loyalties, explore new territory, take creative risks.  The film offers scant hope that such an escape is even worth imagining.

There is one moment that could be the unintended takeaway for anyone keen on cinematic inspiration.  'You should value your work,' April says to Frank.

Look around at what our culture values.  Security?  Conformity?  Status?  Possessions?  Maybe - and I ask your thoughts on this - it's a start to challenge one or two of the norms, chisel away at the ones we least embrace, and go from there.  Revolution begins at the infinitesimal sheering of brain cells away from engrained ideas, and builds on that. 

Start small, stay with it, and value your necessary work.

'To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.'
E.E. Cummings