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You're judging this film by 2020s social standards in America, not 1950s social standards in America. In that time, in that setting, children just didn't talk to their parents like that, and parents didn't talk to their children like that. Parents were right & nobody questioned it ... even when they weren't right, as it turned out in this tragic story. 1950s America didn't have the 2020s mindset & worldview that you're talking about.

So to Neil, there really didn't seem any way out, and he felt inescapably trapped & despairing. Yes, there were some dissidents then, the Beats & so on; but Neil came from a middle-class, upwardly aspiring family; his father had already planned out his entire life for him. That had been Neil's entire upbringing for 17 years, in a culture that saw the life that his father had already planned out for him as the best possible life anyone could want.