Revolutionary Road: Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio 'play nice house' and are titanically miserable

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet: Jack and Rose Redux? After the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film Titanic, millions of its fans speculated if its two stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, would ever work together again, especially in a movie where they would be a couple again.

What many Leo-Kate fans wanted to see on the silver screen was essentially a Titanic-like love story without the Titanic, which, like its real-life counterpart, had sunk after a collision with an iceberg several hundred miles off the Newfoundland coast.

A direct sequel was out of the question; DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson was dead, and since Titanic lies in the historical fiction/romance genre and not science fiction, he could only have co-starred in such an unlikely project either in flashback sequences or as a figure in Kate Winslet’s character’s dreams.

Finally, after a decade’s worth of reading Hollywood’s proverbial tea leaves for any signs of a Leo-Kate onscreen reunion, Paramount Vantage and Dreamworks SKG gave the Titanic fans a movie titled Revolutionary Road in late 2008.

Revolutionary Road: Based on Richard Yates’ 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road was written by Justin Haythe and directed by Sam Mendes and reunites DiCaprio and Winslet with another Titanic cast member – Kathy Bates.

If moviegoers – particularly those who are passionate fans of the first Leo-Kate pairing from 1997 – thought they were going to get a sweepingly romantic and sexy movie that echoed the Jack-and-Rose love story that had captivated them a decade earlier, they were wrong.

Though it begins in 1948, Revolutionary Road takes place mostly in suburban Connecticut in the mid-1950s, a time and place far removed from the Edwardian days of 1912 and the ill-fated RMS Titanic.

When we first meet Frank Wheeler (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) in the late ‘40s opening, he’s a longshoreman and World War II veteran who hopes to become a night cashier, and she’s an aspiring actress. They cross paths at a party – their eyes quite literally meeting across the proverbial crowded room and they end up dancing together.

Titanic fans who have not read Yates’ novel – which had been in what the movie industry calls “development” for over 40 years – probably imagined they’d get a hot bedroom scene immediately after, but Haythe and Mendes fast-forward the plot seven years to 1955. Frank and April are now married, but the sequence – set in a local theater where the actors’ performance group Mrs. Wheeler belongs to is putting on a play – informs us that all is not well in suburbia.

Seven years after meeting at that party, Frank and April have settled into marriage and parenthood. Frank has a commuter job in New York City as a salesman for a company in which his dad once worked, while April keeps house and cares for their two children, Michael (Ty Simpkins) and Jennifer (Ryan Simpkins).

Though this sounds almost like an ideal situation, Frank and April are nothing like Jack and Rose; they are those characters’ antitheses because the actors who play them have grown older and matured professionally and emotionally, and the situation they are in is more serious and sadder.

For instance, very early on in Revolutionary Road the viewer can discern that all is not well in the seemingly idyllic Wheeler marriage. April never achieved her youthful ambition of becoming an actress – her community theater performance is not well received by the audience and she knows it.

The Wheelers have a small circle of close friends to whom they seem to be the perfect couple. Shep Campbell (David Harbour) and his wife Milly (Kathryn Hahn) live next door to the house Frank and April have just bought on Revolutionary Road.

They are also friendly with Helen Givings (Bates), the real estate agent, her husband Howard (Richard Easton) and their son John (Michael Shannon), who is thought to be psychologically unstable but in reality is just bluntly honest.

Where everyone – except for the keenly observant John – sees in the Wheelers the embodiment of the American Dream: 1950s Style, Mendes shows us a façade of a marriage which in reality is coming apart. Frank has resigned himself to the life of being a Company Man who wears his staid business suit – complete with hat and coat- to the office on a daily commute. He doesn’t like his job but sticks to it though it is turning him – emotionally anyway – into a machine, and he channels his boredom into having an unenthusiastic affair with one of the secretaries ( Zoe Kazan).

April wants more out of life for both herself and Frank, so she makes a grand plan to get a job as a translator at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, a city her husband fell in love with during the war. April will bring home the bacon, she suggests; Frank takes time to discover what he wants from life besides the drone-like existence of a gray-suited executive in a boring job.

My Take: As in his earlier film American Beauty, director Sam Mendes is not interested in making a typical feel-good romantic film. On the contrary, Mendes is keen on taking the viewer on a grand tour of a marriage that is on the verge of breaking apart due to Frank and April’s growing desperation with their cookie cutter lives.

Because books like Yates’ 1961 novel rarely appeal to me, I have never read Revolutionary Road, and after seeing its movie adaptation, I don’t think I will because it seems like it will be a very dark and depressing read.

Revolutionary Road is, as I said, the antithesis to Titanic in every possible way. It’s a very intimate and “small” movie suited more for art house movie watchers than it is for the multiplex audiences which loved Leo and Kate back in ’97.

Where Titanic has its moments of levity and joy, Revolutionary Road only offers a few brief moments when Frank and April seem content and even loving toward one another. Indeed, Revolutionary Road’s third act is far sadder than Titanic’s, which is quite a feat considering that James Cameron’s blockbuster depicted one of history’s deadliest maritime incidents.

Technically speaking, the movie is well made: Justin Haythe (The Clearing) captures the essence of 1950s suburbia and the angst of postwar America nicely.

Director Sam Mendes gets fine performances from the entire cast: DiCaprio and Winslet have to do much of the heavy lifting dramatically because their characters are the core of the story, but the supporting cast is worth watching, too, especially Michael Shannon. Shannon’s John is presented by his embarrassed parents as being mentally ill, but his only problem in life is that he sees the falsehoods and artificiality of 1950s America all too clearly.

John Givings: You want to play house you got to have a job. You want to play nice house, very sweet house, you got to have a job you don't like.

Though Revolutionary Road is not dull or badly made, it is not for every viewer who prayed to see Leo and Kate together in a post-Titanic project. Fans of serious literary dramas will appreciate it best, especially those who have read and enjoyed the source novel, of course, and viewers who like to see good actors take on a real challenge will love the movie.

For those Titanic fans who merely wanted DiCaprio and Winslet to recreate their iconic Jack and Rose personas, however, Revolutionary Road is not the movie they were hoping to get.