Revolutionary Road, 4.5 stars

I was pleasantly surprised by this film, which I should have disliked for several reasons. I read the book first and found several parts of it unfilmable without extensive voiceover. The character of April was underwritten, which did not prevent the book from being extremely involving but which could make for a lopsided and uninteresting film. Then I found out about the casting of Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank, which conjured up the unappetizing prospect of a whiny, one-sided film told entirely from the perspective of one of my least favorite actors.

And yet, here I am, giving it 4.5 stars. The unhappy side of 1950's suburban life has never been given quite so banal a face as those of Frank and April Wheeler. Intelligent but not gifted, they are convinced they are somehow "above" their neighbors, even as they burrow deeper and deeper into such an existence. They attempt to persuade themselves that suburbia is a stopover, temporary, just until the children grow up. Then they will live the bohemian lives they envisioned when they first got married. Of course, Frank finds being a "company man" more fulfilling than he ever imagined, and suddenly "excuses" begin to crop up and delay the family's move to Paris.

The casting of DiCaprio in this story has the (probably unintended) effect of making this April's story much more than Frank's, reversing one of my main quibbles with the book. Kate Winslet's performance as April is so far above DiCaprio's that we come away with a deep sense of April as a person, and exactly how her wants and desires converged to drive her actions. Even when she is listening in silence to others or drinking a martini in the background, her expressions tell us more than DiCaprio gives us during his few explosive scenes of emotion. At the end of the film, his strange complacency in the face of tragedy is no more inexplicable than any of his other reactions thanks to DiCaprio's youthful cipher of a face. It has a certain appropriateness, given how repressed men's emotional lives were at this time, but Winslet's grace and stubborn refusal to see the truth are the emotions we leave the theater with. As an evocation of its milieu of unhappy households and the myriad ways in which they differ and yet are alike, Revolutionary Road has no equal.