Revolutionary Road’s “hopeless emptiness”
The eradication of poverty has always seemed very important to me. No matter one’s political beliefs, a world without poverty has always seemed to be inarguably a good thing. Watching Revolutionary Road made me start to doubt that, however. I didn’t see the movie as one about Kate Winslet’s character’s dissatisfaction with the conventional life prescribed by society behind picket fences. I didn’t sympathize with her. Instead, I saw it as a film about whiny rich people who were never happy, a film that condemned life itself to being full of “hopeless emptiness”. Apparently, even the bourgeois is lacking in happiness—a reality that dashes the hopes of any aspiring proletariat, just hoping for a better world. Unfortunately, such a world does not exist. In this way, making the poor rich wouldn’t better their conditions; their old problems would merely be replaced by new ones. This movie showed me how we are all condemned to be unhappy whatever we do, raising doubts not just on the idea of whether people should pursue to live a life of riches (but since even that isn’t worth pursuing), whether people should live at all.
Lean's Film Blog 
Maybe the film is about people, and the driving force behind people that make them always want to improve their lives. While I haven’t seen the movie, I don’t think that someone would make a movie with the purpose of showing quite what you’ve said. Another possibility, maybe they were trying to show a different sort of ‘American Spirit’. Speaking as an American let me tell you: we’re sort of prideful. And a big part of that pride is working to improve our lives, and always seeing ways it can be improved. That doesn’t mean that what you saw in the movie is any less relevant (and again, I haven’t seen it) but from what you’ve said, it sounds like coming from a different culture than the one this movie is aimed at has given you a view the film makers did not intend to show.