Revolutionary Road, round 2.

"Richard Yates's 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, is far from the kind of property that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-Titanic outing together." It is, after all, "among the bleakest books ever written." But of course, it is a big Hollywood movie now, and Charles McGrath tells the story of how that's come about in the New York Times.

"Revolutionary Road is, in part, a portrait of a marriage. But it is also a dissection of personal failure, of what happens when we disappoint ourselves, when we end up on the road we never meant to travel. As you might imagine, the view from that road, when one really stops to look, is very bleak indeed." And Sara Vilkomerson gathers more opinions, too, for a New York Observer cover story.

Updated through 12/20.

"Poor Kate Winslet, wasted in another trite evocation of suburban soul-suck," blogs Ed Gonzalez. "She's good in this, especially during her many smackdowns with an uneven Leonardo DiCaprio, but it's sad watching her earthy acting mode rub up against Sam Mendes's high-falutin' style, which consists almost entirely of slowly zooming into and out of people and their Eames furniture."

"Mendes and Winslet push DiCaprio to places he has never been," writes David Edelstein in New York. "At the height of her fury, April flays Frank, and both the character and the actor have nowhere to hide. DiCaprio loses his sure balance, his control, and has never been more vulnerable or electrifying: Winslet has forced him into the moment.... Is Winslet now the best English-speaking film actress of her generation? I think so."

The film "is honorably and brutally unnerving," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Yet it may suffer, as only an awards-season movie can, from the illusion that pain and art are the same thing."

Gaby Wood's profile of Mendes for the Observer Review opens with an actually pretty amusing anecdote about his directing Winslet and DiCaprio in a sex scene. Then, right away, we learn that he's up to his ears: he's rehearsing two plays in New York - The Winter's Tale and Tom Stoppard's new translation of The Cherry Orchard - and putting the finishing touches on his next film, Away We Go, written by Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida.

And Rachel Abramowitz profiles Mendes for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: James Wood on Yates in the New Yorker, and of course, round 1.

Update: "If Sam Mendes's film version of Revolutionary Road reminds me of anything it is William Wyler's films of Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, The Heiress (1949) and Carrie (1952)," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door. "Wyler has no strong point of view as a film director; like Mendes, he's basically there to serve the material and the actors, but when the material provided is as strong as James and Dreiser and Yates, and the actors are well-matched with their roles (who can forget the gasp-worthy intensity of Laurence Olivier's George Hurstwood in Carrie, or Ralph Richardson's Dr Sloper in The Heiress?) it's fine to simply get out of the way."

Updates, 12/20: "DiCaprio launches himself into terrific Nicholsonian rages with Winslet; they both seem secure as performers and it's tempting to think of this as the Titanic generation's graduation." Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York: "The movie is occasionally prestigey (it's time to put composer Thomas Newman out to pasture), but no film featuring Bug's ferocious Michael Shannon, as a neighbor's mentally disturbed son who has weird insights, could be confused for mere Oscar fare."

Kira Cochrane talks with Winslet for the Guardian.

Via Movie City News, Stewart O'Nan in the October/November 1999 issue of Boston Review: "The Lost World of Richard Yates." And David L Ulin revisits the novel for today's Los Angeles Times.

"To live in a suburb, to be 'suburban': these may be pejorative words across the western world, but nowhere have they been pronounced more fiercely than in the world's most suburbanised country, the US." Ian Jack in the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at December 15, 2008 1:48 AM