Remember It’s A Wonderful Life, the Christmastime feel-good, pajamas, and egg nog family-viewing classic? “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings!” It’s a lovable, slightly corny movie about a small town father and his loving family. Everything seems lost at one point, but of course, to our collective annual relief, it turns out just hunky-dory. I bet even hearing that movie’s title evokes some kind of Pavlovian warm-and-fuzzy feelings in your breast. Now let’s try a thought-experiment and conceptualize a movie that would be the diametric opposite of It’s A Wonderful Life. It would have to be uncomfortably earnest and emotionally intense. It would begin unhappy, then rise up into happiness, only to then plunge down into a depression lower than the depths of hell. Instead of being a feel-good movie, it would be a feel-awful movie.

Well, that movie isn’t imaginary! It’s actually Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road. Based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates, it’s the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young suburban couple of the 1950s. Handsome young Frank commutes to a deadening, boring desk job in New York, and April is a stay-at-home mother and amateur actress. The plot of the movie revolves around the couple’s intense dissatisfaction with their very ordinary life. Having initially aspired to be exciting and lively, they are now crushed to find themselves indistinguishable from all their white-picket-fence neighbors. Their marriage is crumbling under their mutual unhappiness, hostility, and unfaithfulness.

Hoping to reinvigorate their married life, April concocts a plan to move the family to Paris. For a time, the plan has the desired affect, charging the couple with excitement and enthusiasm. When it inevitably falls through, the pendulum swings back into wretchedness and misery. It’s A Horrible Life.

One main theme of Revolutionary Road is the tension between conformity and individuality. Yates once explained that his book was meant as a criticism against the culture of the 1950s, “a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.” In the Wheelers’ intrafamily dynamic, Frank the office worker is representative of the conforming spirit, as he increasingly warms to the corporate business climate. April steers the family on a more “revolutionary” course, yearning for the freedom that Paris embodies. In Yates’s rather ideological view, the bland and consumeristic 1950s were a “betrayal” of national ideals, and the “revolutionary spirit.”

The Wheelers’ desire to be extraordinary often comes off as immature and unrealistic. They live under a lust for excitement, an expectation of perpetual satisfaction gained through emotional experience. Their marriage is based on this wish for constant excitement and infatuation. For them, marriage is an association meant merely for individual satisfaction and pleasure, not an institution of life and mutual development. The near-complete absence of the Wheeler’s two children from the movie is symbolic of this self-obsessed conception of love. They also believe themselves to be possessed of a kind of refinement and special character not available to their neighbors and coworkers. Their emigration plans are based on a hope that the move will automatically initiate self-realization and regeneration.

I can’t help but feel that the “revolutionary spirit” takes a real hit in this movie. As banal as the life of the 1950s may have been, it has a kind of kitschy appeal to us now. Seeing the cohorts of suited businessmen exiting the commuter trains, my first reaction wasn’t “what clones,” but “how well-dressed everyone is!” Obviously the 1950s were not perfect—no time period is. But instead of cultivating their personal and familial life and striving for the good, the Wheelers flail about aimlessly in a selfish, frantic, search for the sublime.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet grippingly portray these emotional and tumultuous characters. DiCaprio is renowned for his boyish good looks, but in this movie you’re more likely to see his face contorted in rage or despair. Winslet so well embodies the psychologically fragile April that the audience constantly feels the urge to dial up the suicide-prevention hotline. Watching these performances isn’t exactly enjoyable (unless you’re a real masochist), but you certainly get the sense of watching real skill in action.

Revolutionary Road is an upsetting movie because it cuts straight into the tensions involved in deciding how to live. In ancient theater, tragedy bared all of society’s incommensurable tensions. Thematically, Revolutionary Road is a descendent of these tragedies, including as it does familial conflicts, deep personal flaws, conflicts of duty, the explosive fault lines of society, and the disputes that rise over competing, imperfect conceptions of what is right. Seen through the hazy filter of the storybook world of the fictional fifties, Revolutionary Road takes on the aura of a drama played out for the audience’s benefit, to evoke fear and pity, to torture them into catharsis.

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” –Franz Kafka

(I’m sorry this is so pretentious.)