Discovering Naomi Watts

She was a wide-eyed woman from Ontario, descending upon Hollywood with visions of stardom dancing in her head. In pursuit of her dream, she had flown into LAX, and she was staying at the home of an aunt who had connections to the film industry. In general, however, she was your stereotypical blonde wannabe just off the bus from the middle of nowhere – beautiful, star-struck and almost assuredly destined to be a waitress. Thus it was fitting that this wide-eyed woman was being portrayed by an actress who was beautiful, who seemed star-struck and who was almost certainly without talent. Actually, it was too fitting. It was painfully fitting.

The actress from Ontario was Betty. The actress playing Betty was Naomi Watts. And as I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. upon its release in 2001, I pondered which actress (the fictional Betty or the actual Naomi) would be the first to star in an adult film. Flatly delivering lines while looking pretty seemed to be the extent of Watts’ talent, and thus Betty’s. True, I knew from experience that Lynch’s most Lynchian films had a habit of producing mechanical, deliberate performances. But this Watts actress I was seeing for the first time seemed determined to take it to a new level. She was tone deaf, and, even worse, she didn’t appear to realize it. This wasn’t just annoying. It was sad.

And yet fittingly, too fittingly, hilariously fittingly, this was all an act. Watts wasn’t clueless. I was. More than an hour into the picture, long after I’d given up on Watts, this happened ...


Betty's audition in Mulholland Dr. is the moment in which Lynch pulls Watts’ talent out of an empty hat. It’s magic – there’s no other word for it. With one scene, Lynch and Watts redefine everything that has happened before it – a switcheroo that would make M. Night Shyamalan envious. As she stands before some movie producers, across from an actor who is as unprepared for what happens as I was, Betty proves that her Hollywood dreams aren’t so unrealistic after all. The woman can act, and thus Watts can too.

Over the latter half of the picture, Watts portrays Betty with some of the same aw-shucks tendencies she established from the outset. But in the final 30 minutes of the film, as Betty is redefined yet again (and more completely), so is Watts.

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Dr., stop reading here. This post is an addendum to my discussion of that film with Ed Howard for The House Next Door. Suffice to say that Mulholland Dr. marks the moment in which Watts didn’t just introduce herself to me; she put me on alert.

Her performance is a marvel. Below I celebrate some of the deep, dark emotions she reveals over the film’s final act. Even as still images, the emotions are palpable. And yet, in final reflection, perhaps Watts’ best work in the picture occurs in the first act, when a very talented actress cons us into thinking that she has no talent at all.

The Conversations: Mulholland Dr.

Readers: The second edition of The Conversations is live at The House Next Door. This time around, Ed Howard and I discuss Mulholland Dr. At least, that’s the center of the conversation. We also discuss David Lynch in general, debate the benefits and drawbacks of surreal/abstract film and touch on Lost Highway, Vertigo and Kiss Me Deadly along the way.

Check it out. As usual, Ed and I hope that our conversation will lead to a larger one among our readers. So if you are so inspired, please leave your comments at The House Next Door.

Previous Edition of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)

Programming Note: Oscars Live Blog on Sunday

Confirming a comment I left last week, let it be known that once again I will be live-blogging the Academy Awards. The Cooler will hardly offer the only running commentary in the blogosphere Sunday night. Thus, even those of you planning to watch the event with a computer on your lap might have other engagements. Heck, many of you might be planning to live-blog the event yourself. But if you have time, please stop by.

In addition to my ruminations on the event, reader rants will be filling the comments section. At least, I hope they will. We’ll all have Monday to go into depth with our reactions, so consider Sunday a chance for some instant gratification, whether you want to celebrate, to complain or to marvel at the size of Nicole Kidman’s forehead. Whatever.

Coverage on ABC begins at 8 pm ET, but I’ll probably dive in somewhere during the red carpet hullaballoo. I never miss a chance to watch inane interviews that feel tired after just one question.

Hope to see you Sunday!

Misty Watercolor Memories: Waltz With Bashir

As a soldier in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Boaz Rein-Buskila made 26 kills, and he can remember each one of them. In the opening of Waltz With Bashir, a genre-spanning film by documentarian Ari Folman, Boaz sits down with his friend and fellow war veteran and describes a nightmare that has haunted him for years – a vision in which his victims come to his apartment building at night with saliva dripping from their teeth and a desire to kill flashing in their eyes. That Boaz’s victims want revenge is obvious, but they don’t say so. Because they can’t say so. Because they are dogs. On orders, Boaz picked them off with a sniper rifle so that their barking wouldn’t alert the enemy to approaching night raids by the Israeli army. That was more than 20 years ago. Now, Boaz’s brain is the thing that’s howling.

If this is the traumatic aftermath of killing animals in wartime, what must it feel like to live with the memory of taking human life? Or what must it feel like to know that you stood by as innocents were murdered around you? These are the questions answered by Waltz With Bashir, which effectively depicts warfare as an exercise in which both sides come away defeated. The losers lose their lives. The victors lose their peace of mind. Both fates are genuinely tragic, though not equally so. Focusing specifically on the Sabra and Shatila massacres, in which Israeli forces effectively enabled (via inaction) the slaughter of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Christian Phalangists, Waltz demonstrates how the unconscionable has a way with catching up with our consciences. Most soldiers head off to war thinking that danger will be found in what they will do. Waltz demonstrates that what a soldier simply sees can be damaging enough.

The film is animated. It’s also a documentary of sorts. Waltz’s dialogue comes from Folman’s recorded conversations with the real men involved (except in two cases in which actors provide voice-over based on the transcripts). If this seems like an unusual approach, it is only slightly. Essentially, Waltz is a docudrama, like Road To Guantanamo, with animated reenactments instead of the familiar live-action versions. In actuality, Waltz isn’t that far removed from neoclassical documentaries – like Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure – that dabble in staged reenactments. In terms of storytelling and reportage, dramatization is dramatization. The most significant difference here isn’t in the approach but in the results – our reactions. There’s no confusion here, no blurring of the lines. Waltz isn’t out to document “what really happened.” Instead it portrays how these events are remembered by the men who were there and have since tried to forget. It’s a different kind of fact-finding exercise, but a legitimate one just the same.

The animation approach frequently liberates Waltz in its efforts to realize emotional truth. One of its stunning reoccurring images shows three soldiers who have been skinny-dipping in the sea emerging from the water to take in the spectacle of mortar-fired flares illuminating the black sky over Beirut. In the soldiers’ thin frames and smooth features we can detect their emotional vulnerability, their childlike naiveté and their alien-ness amidst a cold, rigid war zone. In another scene the omnipresence of fear and chaos in war is evoked by the sight of a tank rumbling through the night as its soldiers fire endlessly into the darkness at an enemy that only might be there – an exaggerated depiction that marries the psychedelic imagination of Hunter S Thompson with the artistic wit and political commentary of Gary Trudeau. Such scenes eliminate any doubt that utilizing animation to tell this story is anything less than an inspired course of action. Thus, a puzzlement of Waltz’s approach is that it’s so conservative with its inspiration.

Despite its capability for alluring visuals, Waltz is something of a tease. The flashbacks to the war are often dazzling, but the depictions of the here-and-now are unsurprisingly simplistic: two characters sitting in a room chatting, sharing memories, their limbs rising and falling deliberately, as if pulled by strings. The illustrations themselves, which combine the palette and gloss of the rotoscoped A Skanner Darkly with the simplicity of Persepolis, aren’t the problem. It’s a slick look. But when Folman is interviewing his former war buddies, there isn’t much to see. Though the animation elucidates the emotion of the war zone, it comes up short in instances when we must grasp the feelings of these older men by reading the expressions of their inky eyes. Talking-head interviews have no business in a film like this, but Waltz has plenty of them. It’s a victim of its own success. After showing us what’s possible, Waltz maddens in the too many instances in which it settles for less.

Still, the film’s most interesting decision is its final one. (Spoilers ahead.) After approximately 88 minutes of nonstop animation, Folman surprises us by cutting to two-or-so minutes of actual newsreel footage that takes us to the closing credits, images of Palestinian women and children screaming as they walk through the refugee camps and confront the carnage. The effect of this footage is as profound as it is clear. Folman is underlining that though some details might be misremembered and thus misimagined here, the atrocities that inspired this cinematic memoir are factual and shouldn’t be denied. I suspect this message targets first and foremost any Israelis who have attempted to shirk responsibility for inaction in Beirut while still wondering aloud how non-Nazi Germans could turn a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War II. That said, it’s a message with universal applicability.

Morally, the use of this archival footage as a final stab toward social consciousness is commendable. Artistically, it’s a mixed bag. Does it work? Absolutely. But it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. That these final few minutes are amongst the most gut-wrenching in the entire picture suggests that perhaps Folman does us a disservice by failing to utilize such footage sooner and more often. The animated sequences of Waltz certainly convey the elusiveness and deceptiveness of memory, thereby teaching us a valuable and sobering lesson about the interminableness of the horrors of war. Trouble is, perhaps it does so at the cost of failing to depict the horrors of this war as effectively as a traditional documentary might have. It’s worth pondering: If the exception of the art is more powerful than its rule, what does that say about the rule?

The Experiment Continues

The Cooler is a year old today. For the author of this blog, the anniversary inspires conflicting reactions: “Already?” and “Only a year?” I’ve been writing about movies for a limited but faithful audience for some 12 years now. Over the past four years I’ve written reviews of most of the new releases I’ve seen in the theater. In that respect, publishing my writing on a blog hasn’t been all that significant a life change, and yet the past year of movie writing has been more rewarding than the previous five put together. Easily.

When I launched the blog, I called it an “experiment.” My fear was that I’d lose myself to it. Given my media background, I have a heightened sense of timeliness and deadlines (more heightened, alas, than my attention to grammar), and so in my mind there was a very real risk that starting a blog would mean sentencing myself to a second job, rather than enhancing an adored recreation. I had nightmares about pressuring myself to write reviews the day after a movie opened, and I knew from experience that the Internet is a forum with an insatiable appetite. What if my love affair with film criticism burned out trying to feed the monster?

That hasn’t happened. Cooler buddies Mark and Hokahey, who offered the strongest encouragement (er, nagging) to launch a blog in the first place, suggested that blogging could be what I wanted it to be – as much of a job or recreation as I desired. I wasn’t sure I believed them, but I decided it was time to try. One year later, it’s clear they were right.

The Cooler isn’t the best single-author movie site in the blogosphere. I’m sure of that. But I couldn’t tell you which blog deserves that honor, and that’s the secret to my satisfaction. The wonderful truth is that the blogosphere offers something for everyone. There are movie blogs that post a few times a month, some that post dutifully every day and some that post multiple times a day. Some are thoughtful, some are silly. Some are serious, some are sarcastic. There’s no right way to do it. If it were up to me, I’d post entertaining and thoughtful commentary almost daily, as Ed Howard does at Only The Cinema. But I don’t have the time. In fact, I don’t even have the time to keep up with reading Ed’s daily posts, much as I’d like to. So I comfort myself with the knowledge that while “real life” might cause me to go a week without posting, there must be readers like me for whom that pace is perfect. If the whole point of bringing my writing to the blogosphere is to share it with others, I post at a pace that is conducive to following along. I envy Ed’s output, I do, but I don’t feel compelled to compete with it. I can’t compete. I know that, and I’m totally okay with that. For me, that means I’m doing this thing right. (I didn't start blogging to be competitive.)

Speaking of Ed, I wasn’t familiar with him a year ago or even nine months ago. Now we’re not only fans of one another’s work, we’re collaborators. Last month, our first installment of The Conversations, coauthored give-and-takes on film, debuted at The House Next Door. (The second installment is in the works right now.) Likewise, before I ever traded thoughts with Ed, I debated documentaries with Fox, another blogger whose work I discovered within the year and who graces The Cooler with regular comments. At my blog or his, Fox and I tend to agree on only one thing: that we enjoy disagreeing with one another. Cyberspace is full of vitriol, but Fox and I have had countless passionate debates while fostering mutual respect, rather than forgetting it.

I could go on, but it’s safer to stop here – knowingly leaving out the names of many Cooler regulars and favorites, rather than risking the accidental snubbing of one or two. A year ago I wrote, “I believe this blog will be measured by what my readers bring to it.” I still think that. To all those who have left thoughtful comments and used my writing as the starting point to a larger conversation, thank you! Sincerely. As far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s all about. It’s somewhat fitting, actually, that this post should follow my review of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, because in the past year I’ve found that bloggers are a tight-knit, mostly supportive group with a camaraderie that reminds of the locker room scenes in The Wrestler. (That we do all this almost foolishly – for love and not money – only strengthens the comparison. Not to mention that I suspect that many of us do it half-naked, but that’s another story.)

Speaking of blogger camaraderie, an overdue point of blog business:

A few weeks ago Getafilm's Daniel Gatahun honored me with a Dardos Award that, due to a hectic real-world schedule, I have yet to acknowledge. Now, as I see it, there are three ways to respond to such recognition, two of them incorrect: 1) Get cocky and feel overly self-important, failing to realize that the Dardos exercise is more or less a chain e-mail of warm fuzzies; 2) Get cocky and act as if too cool to recognize a genuine compliment because it comes in a chain-esque form; 3) See the Dardos Awards for what they are at best: an opportunity to encourage and thank your peers. I choose No. 3.

On that note, I humbly accept my Dardos Award (more information at the end of this post), and I eagerly look forward to the second part of this exercise, which is bestowing the award on five other bloggers. I’m going to attempt to present the award to five bloggers who I don’t think have received Dardos Awards to this point, or who at least haven’t accepted them on their blogs, as far as I know. So, Dardos go to the following:

Craig of The Man From Porlock, who writes not enough for how much I enjoy him.

Ed Howard of Only The Cinema, who writes too often for how much I enjoy him (I can't keep up).

Fox of Tractor Facts, who is just so constantly wrong about everything, but who I begrudgingly read anyway (I jest).

FilmDr of The Film Doctor, whose daily reports of a two-week student filmmaking course still has me smiling.

Mystery Man of Mystery Man on Film, whose recognition of all the ways Indiana Jones sucks makes up for the fact that he admires the screenplay of Gran Torino.

Thanks, gents!

In the spirit of recognizing others, I’d also like to welcome a new blogger to the neighborhood. More accurately, I'd like to congratulate this blogger on moving out of The Cooler’s basement in order to have a place of his own. Cooler regular Hokahey, who has contributed countless comments and collaborated on a handful of posts here over the past year, is now blogging at Little Worlds!

In recent weeks, Hokahey has been plagued by some of the same concerns I had before launching The Cooler. But now he’s committed. I hope you’ll go over and check him out and leave him a fruit basket or something.

And with that, “the experiment” continues. The coming year is sure to lead to more collaboration, more passionate exchanges, another blog-a-thon and who knows what else? Whatever it is, you can cue up the Sinatra, because I’ll be doing it my way.

A heartfelt thank you to all the readers and commenters who have made an otherwise forgettable movie year so enriching.

-- Jason Bellamy


The Dardos Awards

The Dardos Award is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.

Recipients are supposed to do the following:

1) Accept the award by posting it on your blog along with the name of the person who has granted the award and a link to his/her blog.

2) Pass the award to another five blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment, remembering to contact each of them to let them know they have been selected for this award.

The Passion of … : The Wrestler

Singers don’t stop being singers because the crowd goes away. A musician’s talent is just as significant alone beside a campfire as in public before screaming fans. Competitive athletes can challenge one another, or themselves, as authentically on empty fields, courts and fairways as in sold-out stadiums, gymnasiums and golf courses. But what about professional wrestlers – hybrids of artistry and athleticism? For them, it’s different. Theirs is a craft that relies upon the response of an audience. When the crowd goes away, the skills of a professional wrestler become irrelevant. Magicians can relate. So can comedians. So can strippers.

Darren Aronfsky’s The Wrestler finds two of these audience-dependent performers losing their significance. Mickey Rourke is Randy “The Ram,” a somebody of professional wrestling two decades ago who is now just slightly more than a nobody. Marisa Tomei is Cassidy, a stripper with a rock-hard body that most 20-year-olds would envy and a face that reveals her double-that age. In image-based businesses, Randy and Cassidy no longer fit the prototypes. They are like Mouseketeers who have outgrown their ears. Once the ideal, they have become novelty acts perilously close to losing their novelty. That’s what they have in common. What separates them is the degree to which they self-identify by their professional personas. Randy, whose real name is Robin, has played his stage character so long that he struggles to find the private man inside. Cassidy, whose real name is Pam, steadfastly separates her professional role from her private life, struggling only when the lines begin to blur. And so it goes.

The Wrestler examines the inevitable loneliness that plagues those who must please others in order to please themselves. The self-centeredness that has estranged Randy from his daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) belies the darker truth that Randy lives for the approval of others. Stephanie gets the shaft simply because she is one small voice competing against the full-throated cheers of Randy’s adoring fans – dwindling though they may be. Randy will do anything to entertain them: Bleach his hair. Bronze his body. Ingest steroids. Risk “bitch tits.” Cut himself with a razor blade. Put his life on the line. If you know anything about professional wrestling, you know that Randy’s bloody match against Necro Butcher isn’t the norm. Getting bashed with a folding chair is one thing. Wrestlers allow staples to be driven into their skin or windows to be shattered over their head only when they are desperate. In Randy’s prime, he wouldn’t have stooped so low. Back then, he didn’t need to. The cheers came easily.

This much we know without ever seeing it. One of the strengths of The Wrestler is the way it conveys Randy’s previous stardom with little overt exposition and without the use of flashbacks. The montage of glowing glory-days headlines that runs during the opening credits lays the foundation, but more effective are the numerous “locker room” scenes in which Randy interacts with other wrestlers. Most of these much-younger men now have more talent than Randy, but they don’t have his fame, and, as they’d say in Bull Durham, they’ve never been to The Show. Randy is a fallen star, but in that context the word star still applies. Randy’s peers of long-shots and no-shots positively adore him. He is for them a mythic figure. Their childlike awe in his presence is painfully sweet. Baseball fans might note how the wrestlers’ reactions to The Ram resemble the memorable scene at the 2002 All-Star Game when Ted Williams was wheeled onto the field and players broke ranks to get up close to the legend.

Likewise, The Wrestler is adept at conveying the depths to which Randy’s career has fallen. There’s the event in which his backstage dressing room is a children’s classroom. There’s the event where his head nearly touches the fluorescent lights of the drab, low-ceilinged venue as he balances on the top rope before his signature “Ram Jam.” There’s the humbling autograph session where the lack of fans walking up to the yesteryear idols isn’t as heart rending as the realization that so many of these battered and bruised wrestlers would be physically incapable of walking up to their fans. Amongst the general public, Randy is as much a relic as the original Nintendo that he leaves hooked up in his trailer so that in pixel form he can keep taking on The Ayatollah as if still in his heyday.

Rourke’s performance of Randy is an instant classic. Amongst films released in 2008, there isn’t a better marriage of actor and character – and that includes Jean-Claude Van Damme’s riveting performance as himself in JCVD. Think about that for a second. Rourke, the former Next Big Thing who left acting to become a not-so-good boxer and then left the public eye entirely, has a lot in common with The Ram. Both men are fighters and entertainers who fell out of the limelight. But Randy needs an audience while Rourke seems uncomfortable with one. Rourke’s pretty boy features long gone and his muscles returned (thanks to steroids, I’d suspect), he is every bit the gladiator, still fighting though he’s over the hill. If Rourke doesn’t do all his stunts in this film, he does most of them – at 56 years old. (Now think about that for a second.) But this role is about more than more than brawn. In Rourke’s eyes we see serenity in the ring and fear out of it. There aren’t many actors who could convince us that a barbed-wire wrestling ring is a sanctuary while a supermarket deli counter is hellhole, but Rourke does it effortlessly and naturalistically.

In an Aronofsky film that last trait is a rare commodity. The director of such films as Requiem For A Dream and The Fountain, Aronofsky has a visual gift but the subtlety of a rhinoceros. As usual for an Aronofsky picture, some emotions come about too quickly in The Wrestler, as if determined to remain cliché, particularly in the relationship between Randy and Stephanie. But Rourke and Wood are gifted enough to make it a non-issue. Meanwhile, Tomei takes an underwritten role and gives it oomph. Rather than underplay the Cassidy persona in order to foreshadow the unveiling of Pam the single mom, Tomei fearlessly honors Cassidy’s professionalism. As a result, Randy isn’t the only mark who looks at Cassidy’s naked figure and tattooed skin and buys into the illusion. We do too.

(Mild spoilers ahead) Whether Pam’s film-capping effort to save Randy is genuine, false or just another moment when Aronofsky impatiently throws character development into a microwave, I’m not sure. What I know is that the conclusion of The Wrestler is otherwise perfect. As Randy wheezes and grunts through his throwback exhibition with The Ayatollah – in what will either be his last match or the first of several ill-advised life-threatening potential last matches – our emotions are mixed. Do we cheer the bravery of a man who refuses to quit living the life he loves? Or do we cry for his cowardice, for his inability to let Randy retire so that Robin might live? Aronofsky leaves it open, but I lean toward the latter. Perhaps even more effectively than in Requiem, Aronofsky shows the cost of addiction. Randy’s drug of choice is public adulation. He’ll seek the cheers until it kills him. The Wrestler might be the first sports movie where winning means losing.

They Can’t Handle the Truth: Revolutionary Road

Hyped as the film that brings back together again Titanic stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, Revolutionary Road is in danger of being remembered for a different reunion of Best Picture Oscar ingredients. It has hardly gone unnoticed, nor should it, that this adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel takes a tale of suburban depression and disenfranchisement and puts it into the hands of director Sam Mendes, whose American Beauty eviscerates the unspoken agony of Pleasantville-living. So let’s get this out of the way from the start: Revolutionary Road is no more about the suburbs than Casablanca is about a city in Morocco. Oh, sure, the setting counts. The quaint street where April and Frank Wheeler discover their malaise is as much a character in this film as is the pit of corruption, hope and shattered dreams that is Rick’s Café in Casablanca. But to conclude that Mendes’ latest film is a condemnation of suburbia is to miss the point.

Revolutionary Road is a conviction of the Wheelers. Their crime? Denial. Yes, Mendes’ film, from a screenplay by Justin Haythe, makes good on opportunities to mock suburban living, but this is mere decoration, like the tiny plants Kathy Bates’ matriarchic Helen gives to Winslet’s April to fill in the “messy patch” at the end of the driveway. Suburbia doesn’t make the Wheelers miserable. Instead suburbia is the mirror by which they recognize their long-denied unhappiness. Characters turning 30, April and Frank are for the first time realizing that they have emotional wrinkles. As much as anything, Revolutionary Road is about that transitional period of life when your identity stops being about what you are “going to be” and starts being about what you “are.” When April, having pulled trashcans to the curb, stands at the end of the family driveway and looks up and down the street, she sees not just the numbing suburban homogeny of the 1950s but also a lack of opportunity. Revolutionary Road is a path to more of the same. The only way April’s life can evolve is if she forces the process.

Which is precisely what she does. A good 30 minutes of the film are dedicated to April’s proposed family escape to Paris. She’ll work; DiCaprio’s Frank will find himself; and together they’ll be happy, less because Paris is a utopian paradise (though uncultured April thinks it is) than because they’re doing something new and yet familiarly exhilarating: chasing a youthful dream. Revolutionary Road is ultimately about how all this empty dreaming produces agony – the Wheelers are a bickering couple when we meet them, and before we leave them they devolve into hatred-spewing monsters – but the pain of their crash landing is directly attributable to the grace with which the Wheelers’ hopeful Paris vision is allowed to soar.

Mendes, cinematographer Roger Deakins and the team of Winslet and DiCaprio produce some of the film’s best moments here: Frank’s cat-who-ate-the-canary surveillance of the hustle and bustle of Grand Central Station; April’s radiant strut down the sidewalk after booking passage to Europe; the evening with Shep (David Harbour) and Milly (Kathryn Hahn) in which the dismay of friends only emboldens the Wheelers’ confidence. One can know that the Wheelers are headed toward an emotional apocalypse, but during this cloudless portion of the film the storms ahead are impossible to foresee. This juxtaposition is crucial, and it’s the reason that Revolutionary Road separates itself from your run-of-the-mill grim art-house fare. Momentarily, these characters feel as if they actually have something to lose. Their potential to be special is just that, potential, but it’s enough to make us think that maybe, just maybe, the neighbors aren’t wrong to put the Wheelers on a pedestal.

Instead, all this potential comes tumbling down, and what’s never made clear is whether the Wheelers were deluding themselves all along or were indeed this close to liberation. This isn’t a complaint. Even the Wheelers don’t know the truth. To use the word that instantly recalls The Shawshank Redemption, the Wheelers have become institutionalized. Frank is like Brooks the librarian, so resigned to his prison cell that he panics when he gets an opportunity to leave it. April is like Andy Dufresne, refusing to give up hope. In this case, however, the desperate attempt at freedom ends with further imprisonment. By the end of the film, April’s verve has been completely obliterated.

For this, it would be easy to blame Frank, who is cowardly, dishonest and too slick for his own good. But April is equally naïve, and long before Frank told her that he wanted to go back to Paris, he admitted that he had no clue what he wanted to do with his life. It shows. DiCaprio’s performance is a marvel. He manages to let Winslet’s April maintain the spotlight without ever holding back. If Winslet, delivering perhaps the best performance of her impressive career, is the lever that lifts Revolutionary Road to greatness, DiCaprio is the fulcrum – essential and all too easy to overlook. Not that Deakins could make such a mistake. His slow-zooming camera adores the face of DiCaprio’s Frank: ashamed in front of his children; euphoric in Grand Central Station; and fearful across the lunch table from his potential new boss. In these moments, DiCaprio is nearly motionless. Later, however, as Frank becomes entirely unhinged with emasculated rage, DiCaprio pairs pathetic weakness and frightening ruthlessness with an in-your-face bluntness that few other actors could match.

Still, this is Winslet’s film from the moment we first lay eyes on April, ashamed on stage in a community performance she will forever remember for shattering her aspirations of becoming an actress. As the stereotypical closeted housewife of the 50s, April makes for an easy sympathetic figure, but that’s not all that she is. If this isn’t the best performance by an actress in a leading role this year, it’s at least the most impressive realization of a truly multidimensional female character. To Winslet’s credit, April’s optimism is as visceral as her desperation, her blind devotion to Frank is as convincing as her eventual vengeful betrayal of her husband and her guilt over not finding complete fulfillment through motherhood is as heartbreaking as her lonely domestic imprisonment. On top of all this, Winslet takes everything DiCaprio can throw at her without ever falling out of the frame. Simply put, she’s extraordinary. DiCaprio, too.

These actors have come a long way in just over a decade. The previous time Winslet and DiCaprio shared the screen, they had to compete for our attention with James Cameron’s multi-million-dollar prop. Not anymore. This time around, it’s the Wheelers who are upending and sliding into an icy abyss, and the scene compositions of Mendes and Deakins appropriately reflect the character study. In the final act, Mendes allows the drama to get a little too stagy – in part due to a Michael Shannon supporting turn that wows upon arrival before overstaying its welcome – but with Winslet and DiCaprio in the spotlight it’s hard to blame him for standing back and admiring the view. More than a decade after they became overnight mega-stars, Revolutionary Road reveals Winslet and DiCaprio to be two of the greatest talents in the business. And it’s interesting to wonder: had Titanic turned out to be the pinnacle of their careers, might Kate and Leo today be filled with the doubt that ravages April and Frank? Maybe. As Revolutionary Road makes clear, worse than not being special is believing incorrectly that you are.