Early Word

Revolutionary Road Disappoints

Winslet, DiCaprio pic confuses pain with art.

Oscar season is here, but New Yorker film critic David Denby isn't pulling his punches. Writing on the new film Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of a Richard Yates novel, Denby says, "It is honorably and brutally unnerving. Yet it may suffer, as only an awards-season movie can, from the illusion that pain and art are the same thing." The movie nails the look and feel of the 1950s and has strong performances from Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. But “there’s a sourness, a relentlessness about the movie which borders on misanthropy." By the end, director Sam Mendes has even damaged Yates’ novel: "By schematizing the book's relationships and by cutting away Yates's extraordinary precision, psychological nuance, and eloquent sorrows, Mendes has, I think, unwittingly revealed something unconvincing about the material."