When Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road came out, a film critic I respected alluded to how unoriginal this Sam Mendes movie was.  First of all, that critic said, was that Mendes had already done a suburban discontent type of movie in American Beauty.  The second reason, the critic argued, was that Mad Men was already dealing with the 50's and 60's period of rising American affluence, contrasted with rising unhappiness and existential crises - basically how the "American Dream" was as illusion.

Well, I just saw Revolutionary Road, and although a good movie, the expectation given to me by that critic kind of ruined the movie for me.  Mad Men, being a TV Series, bides its time to make a point. It is languid, perhaps even a bit ponderous, and that is why I love it so. The finely crafted set of looks, glances, and subtle nuanced interaction of the characters is what does it for me - it's all about subtext, and what is unsaid.

Revolutionary Road on the other hand was nothing but bickering and dialogue.  While good bickering and good dialogue, my expectations of a more subtext based movie rich in meanings not readily made apparent kind of made the experience jarring and less enjoyable than it would have been than had I not had any primer on the movie at all.

Actually, come to think of it, even if the comparison with Mad Men not been made, I still would have made some kind of comparison since the era was quite similar.   Although Mad Men was supposed to be half a decade after, realistically not everyone would have always had the latest and greatest stuff - The building facades, the building interiors, the cars on the streets, even people's stuff wouldn't always be period correct in the sense that it would necessarily be from the 60's.  Some of them is bound to be from a decade or so ago.

So anyway, being that the comparison was inevitable, I was quite disappointed that R.R. had that much dialogue.  So much so that it was a bit like  Shakesperean play where  the characters were set up by plot devices just so things could be voiced just so the audience does not miss it.

For instance, the scenes with the Schizophrenic was a bit too... staged.  Basically, he was there to point shit out so we, as the audience, don't miss it; Mendes could have just as well hit us in the head with the script whilst yelloing, "Listen the fuck up, this is important!"

All in all, a waste of Winslet and DiCaprio.

From: http://www3.washingtontim ...

That was the second part about R.R. that was a bit afraid to comment on, but really, one does not expect this from the "greatest generation".  I mean, the womanizing, the boozing, every generation has those - surely Roger Sterling is about the same age as the Wheelers.