DiCaprio and Winslet Reunite on Revolutionary Road
To be directed by Sam Mendes! Has anyone read the book by Richard Yates? Without spoilers, what’s the basic gist?
No matter what a person thought of Titanic (I loved it myself), I think Winslet and Dicaprio had great chemistry, so it’ll be nice to see them working together again.
Aw, heck yeah! They still had awesome chemistry during one exchanged glance during the Oscar broadcast last month! I can’t wait to see what the more-mature Winslet and DeCaprio can bring to the screen.
The wikipedia entry on the novel is not very spoilerific. I mean, avoid it if you’re a complete spoiler phobe, but if you just want to know who the main characters are and what they’re like, it’s fine.
Suffice it to say it’s bloody perfect casting for both leads: she as a doomed aspiring amateur actress with delusions of grandeur, he as an alcoholic macho man wanna-be with a corporate desk job going nowhere fast. And it’s set, perfectly enough for Mendes, in the superficially perfect poisoned cesspool of the suburban Connecticut in 1955.
After reading the wikipedia entry, I can only say:
Oh boy! Yet another scathing indictment of 1950s America! We just can’t have enough movies on that subject! And how timely!
But I do like that Kate Winslet, though…
My thought exactly … we just haven’t had enopugh movies on the theme of “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit”.
The real problem is that the story is completely outdated. American culture has changed so completely that the only way to play the topic is as a historical set piece. And those are dull. I was thinking it might play for the Marchant-Ivory crowd, but they tend to like their historical set pieces to be more … historical. And more lush and opulent, not terms I associate with 50s suburbia.
If anything, Mendes already covered this material in (the vastly overrated) American Beauty. Now that Conrad Hall is dead (the main reason that film worked as well as it did), is there anything that Mendes (Winslet’s hubby, btw) can contribute to this theme that Douglas Sirk didn’t already cover back in the 50s? I’ll see it because of Kate & Leo (and no doubt a strong supporting cast), but I’m not holding my breath for anything special.