existence they 've chosen . The year is 1955 , and Frank has a New York job that bores him , marketing business machines . He takes solace in feeling superior to his work , and also in his midday martinis and occasional dip into the secretarial pool . April , meanwhile , wanted to be an actress , and still feels she 's meant for higher things . Watch DiCaprio and Winslet talk about their reunion '' Moved to reach for something more , April comes up with a plan : She and Frank will sell their home and move to Paris , where she 'll work as a government secretary and he will ... find himself . -LRB- It 's like a '60s fantasy a decade ahead of time . -RRB- `` Revolutionary Road '' was directed by Sam Mendes , who made the glibly scathing `` American Beauty , '' only here he wants us to share not just Frank and April 's misery but the frail reveries that hold them together . The escape-to-Paris idea is naive , impractical -- a pipe dream . Yet it 's fueled by something Mendes captures about the '50s ,
-LRB- Entertainment Weekly -RRB- -- In the movies , `` the suburbs '' are never just a place . They 're a state of mind , a mythology we all know in our bones . Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio share a happy moment in `` Revolutionary Road . '' The myth goes something like this : The suburbs are comfortable , maybe even beautiful , but their serenity is rooted in a friendly American conformity , so that the people who live there have to repress their true selves , which will emerge when they drink too much and have affairs , or rage at each other for their dishonesty , which was all caused in the first place by ... the suburbs . The best thing about `` Revolutionary Road , '' a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates ' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple , is that it does n't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie . It only begins there . Frank and April Wheeler -LRB- Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet -RRB- are about 30 , with two kids , and both believe they can evade the traps of the