Kate Winslet

Great Performances Wasted in Sterile ‘Revolutionary Road’

BrianTT — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:50:48 -0700

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) refuse to believe that they’re like everyone else in the 1950’s suburbia of Sam Mendes’ frustrating “Revolutionary Road”. They may go to the same jobs and travel in the same social circles, but, unlike the bored housewives and husbands around them, they haven’t given up on their dreams.

They’re ego-driven, selfish characters who long to escape the ennui of the white picket fence but are constantly brought back to it by the trappings of family and work.

Frank and April live the unfulfilled lives of millions from the ’50s to the ’00s, but to what cinematic end? No one involved with “Revolutionary Road” asked the crucial question - why should we care? There’s a misanthropy, a bitterness that pervades the entirety of “Revolutionary Road” that makes it impossible to emotionally invest in the broken dreams of the Wheelers and, consequently, keeps Sam Mendes’ film from becoming the effective drama that it could have been in a less clinical director’s hands.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet star in “Revolutionary Road”.
Photo credit: Francois Duhamel, DreamWorks

From the beginning of “Revolutionary Road,” Frank and April are fighting. The Wheelers have a beautiful family, nice friends, and a gorgeous home, but they feel trapped in their suburban existence and they lash out at each other constantly.

April longs for her dreams of being an actress and Frank loathes his boring job. Frank cheats on his wife with the new girl at the office and April not-so-secretly hates her husband. To everyone they encounter, Frank and April seem like the perfect couple, but they’re seething with self-hatred and resentment.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet star in “Revolutionary Road”.
Image credit: DreamWorks

The Wheelers devise one last way to recapture the revolutionary spirits of their youth - they’ll leave suburbia behind and head to Paris. With tragic results, the hooks of daily life in the real world - mostly career and family - make that transition difficult. When neighbor Helen Givings (Kathy Bates) and her troubled son (Michael Shannon) come over to visit, the supposedly mentally ill man sees right through the martini lunch facade of the Wheelers and pushes the right buttons that will lead to inevitable tragedy.

“Revolutionary Road” is yet another film about the outward perfection of suburban married life masking in inner turmoil and pain. The problem is that for those films to be effective, the audience needs a reason to care and Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe completely discard the element of likable characters. Frank and April are not good people. They’re selfish, bickering souls who most of us wouldn’t want to spend a few minutes with much less a film’s running time. They’re fighting before the credits even roll, giving the audience no reason to care about them fixing their marital problems or catching their dreams.

What saves “Revolutionary Road” from being purely a mediocre domestic drama is the work by DiCaprio and Shannon. The latter is so riveting that when he leaves the movie after his brief time in it, you’ll wish you could go with him, even if his character does feel a little contrived.

As for Leo, he still looks a little young for a part like this but that almost makes the performance more effective, considering Frank is essentially a child stuck in a man’s body. Going from bitterly angry to tragically wounded in the same sentence, DiCaprio is great. And Winslet is always fantastic, even if the part she’s given is underwritten.

In the end, “Revolutionary Road” feels designed to make a statement or telegraph something important about the bleakness of dreams lost in the streets of suburbia. But it’s the sensation that it’s “designed” that sinks it. Everything feels contrived, from the name of the street the Wheelers live on (also the name of the movie) to even just the fact that the Wheeler children disappear at the most opportune times for the plot.

Perhaps it’s because AMC’s “Mad Men” tackles many of the same themes with a much more believable dimensionality, but nothing about “Revolutionary Road” feels real, making the misanthropy even harder to swallow. It’s a sterile, contrived film about unlikable people that’s only worth seeing for a few very good performances. Sam Mendes puts the Wheelers in a bubble and asks us to care about them in his typically cold, clinical manner but the story he’s telling required a little heat and a little air to really work.

‘Revolutionary Road’ stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, and Michael Shannon. ‘Revolutionary Road,’ which was written by Justin Haythe and directed by Sam Mendes, opened in Chicago on January 2, 2009.

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com

Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes Make ‘The Reader’ a Worthwhile Adaptation

BrianTT — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 08:52:30 -0700

Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Two of the best actors working in film today, Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet, offer enough to make “The Reader” a cinematic book worth reading, even if it’s not the masterpiece it could have been with a few different choices by its director and writer.

“The Reader” is a surprisingly ineffective film when approached on an emotional level, as if director Stephen Daldry and adapter David Hare are very consciously trying to keep the viewer at arms length, but Fiennes and Winslet are doing such quality work that it merits recommendation just as an acting exercise. Just as the great work by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella elevate “Frost/Nixon” to a recommendation despite the film’s flaws, “The Reader” could have been a better film but its two leads are perfect.

Part of the problem with “The Reader” is that its lead character, Michael Berg (David Kross) is such a non-entity. The adult Michael is played by Fiennes, but the majority of the film is a flashback to Berg’s teenage years in post-WWII Germany. When he was only fifteen, Michael met the stunningly open Hanna, who introduced him to the world of sex. Hanna and Michael would spend days bathing each other, making love, and the young man would read to the illiterate older woman.

Michael reads “The Odyssey”, “The Lady with the Little Dog”, and “Huck Finn” to his lover, until she disappears one day with no warning. Years later, while in law school, Michael sits in on a Nazi trial and discovers that Hanna had a dark, dark secret. Michael knows something about Hanna’s past that could affect the trial, but he stays quiet. “The Reader” is about how we deal with defining moments in our lives, both individually and as a nation.

It could be a flaw of the source material (a hit book by Bernhard Schlink that I’ll admit that I’m unfamiliar with) or Hare’s adaptation of it, but I never felt like I knew the young Michael, a fatal flaw that never allowed me to react to the film on more than an intellectual level. Winslet bares more than just her soul in a physically and emotionally open role but Michael is always a mystery. It could be argued that the adult Michael is trying to come to terms with an important chapter of his life, one that he fully doesn’t understand himself, but instead of the three-actor showcase that “The Reader” could have been, I merely found Kross to be the connection between Fiennes and Winslet. The actor and character gets lost.

What’s unusual about “The Reader” is that this is clearly a story about emotionally raw and complex issues like forgiveness, retribution, first love, passion, and a country’s coming to terms with its dark past. Those are the issues that made the book such a phenomenon. And yet it’s a film that never hits the emotional chords that could have elevated it from an “interesting” film to one that could have been truly memorable. It’s an acting exercise instead of the commentary on humanity or even the believable character study that it could have been.

There’s a nagging sensation that, other than some of the daring decisions by Winslet, the team involved in adapting “The Reader” are going through the motions. There’s a passion missing from the storytelling that would have elevated the film to another level. Of course, it could have been worse, as Daldry and Hare do avoid the melodrama that could have easily seeped its way into a story like “The Reader” and turned it into an overly emotional mess.

Kate Winslet gives one of the best performances of the year - don’t be surprised if she finally gets her long-deserved Oscar - and Fiennes continues to be one of the most interesting actors alive with his third great turn of the year after “In Bruges” and “The Duchess”, but that’s the extent of the praise for “The Reader”, a movie that’s never bad but too easy to forget by the time you move on to the next book on your list of cinematic adaptations.

‘The Reader’ stars Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross, Bruno Ganz, and Lena Olin. ‘The Reader,’ which was written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, opened in Chicago on December 25, 2008.

By BRIAN TALLERICO
Content Director
HollywoodChicago.com
brian@hollywoodchicago.com

Hit-or-Miss Mastermind Woody Allen Recaptures Genius With Eccentric ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’

HollywoodChicago.com — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:01:00 -0600

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – While legendary writer and director Woody Allen can’t always be equated with sheer genius these days and is more accurately described as a hit-or-miss proposition, the sorely undermarketed and film-festival touring “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” serves as unquestionable retribution for his recently questionable work.

The film, which stars Hollywood sensations Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz, all throughout makes you feel like Allen’s script has something brilliant up its artistic sleeve. While at times you’ll easily predict when sex is on deck, Allen uses “No Country for Old Men” star Javier Bardem literally as his blunt instrument.

Penélope Cruz stars as María Elena in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” from director Woody Allen.
Photo credit: Victor Bello, The Weinstein Company

In the real world, of course, even a man of his charisma couldn’t walk up to a woman with Scarlett Johansson’s magnetism and lure her into a weekend of bliss and eroticism with these simple words: “We’re getting on my plane in an hour for a weekend of drinking fine wine and making love.”

While Bardem can this time because Allen’s script makes Johansson’s risqué character do it, his true treat is scoring a triple play by convincing Johansson’s rule-driven friend – played by the relatively unknown Rebecca Hall – to seek the same interesting slice of life.

Hall’s character is completely out of character in going along with this ride and is in the process of marrying a man who feels to her much like a sedative.

Javier Bardem (left center) and Scarlett Johansson (right center) star in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”.
Photo credit: Victor Bello, The Weinstein Company

Amid all the wining and dining, Bardem displays his range as an actor. He puts out of our mind his powerfully villainous character in “No Country for Old Men” and completely transforms himself for Allen’s creation into an artistic, charismatic and confident Spanish lover.

The protagonists, of course, wouldn’t be complete without the antagonistic presence of Penélope Cruz. Despite training rigorously with a teacher and a paintbrush for her painting scenes, though, Cruz still admits to having “faked” these scenes.

In fact, Cruz says in real life she’s a “terrible artist” and is nothing like her “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” character. While she gets by with the brush in the film, it’s not her painting that ultimately slathers herself memorably onto you.

Left to right on set: Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Woody Allen for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”.
Photo credit: Victor Bello, The Weinstein Company

It’s her irate, suicidal and jealous performance that stands out with its emotional and physical carnage. Cruz landed the role of María Elena from director Woody Allen in 40 seconds flat.

Scarlett Johansson’s appearance in the latest Allen work of art is especially his personal joy. Despite appearing in three Allen films in the past three years (“Match Point” in 2005, “Scoop” in 2006 and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” in 2008), Johansson decisively denies being his latest “muse”.

When the subject has come up repeatedly in press junkets for the film, she always says they take pleasure in “having fun” together. The 72-year-old Allen, on the other hand, liberally confesses that the 23-year-old “Lost in Translation” star has often been the muse for many of his latest films.

RELATED IMAGE GALLERY
View our full, high-resolution “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” image gallery.

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More film reviews from critic Adam Fendelman.

Johansson follows in the shadows of actresses and former Allen lovers Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow. Instead of it being Johansson in 2005’s “Match Point,” Allen initially selected British star Kate Winslet.

While Winslet may have gone on to muse Allen thereafter, she pulled out from the 2005 film to spend more time with her children.

Despite its interesting backstory and compelling film story, the whole work of art that is “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” goes somewhat to poop in its anti-climatic ending. You can feel Allen struggling with how to end this fascinating journey. His decision to waiver somewhere in the grey matter of life is a tragically unfulfilling choice.

Had the ending been rewritten, “Vicky Christina Barcelona” would be one of Allen’s finest works without question. Even without the rewrite, though, it stands as one Allen magnum opus nonetheless.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which is written and directed by Woody Allen and stars Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Patricia Clarkson and Chris Messina, opens on Aug. 15, 2008.

By ADAM FENDELMAN
Editor-in-Chief
HollywoodChicago.com
adam@hollywoodchicago.com