January 4th, 2009
This soup recipe is good, but I used 4 cloves of garlic and no lemon juice. On my way to see Revolutionary Road. UPDATE: I cried in the book but not in the movie. Unknown actors would have been better. Kate Winslet didn’t do April right — I went looking for corroboration that her voice was weird and found it here: “In the past, Winslet has played American women without straining, but this time she enunciates with laborious precision—you can see her propelling vowels and consonants like smoke rings.”
David Denby goes on: “She and Mendes (her offscreen husband) have worked out a conception of April as a will-driven, semi-hysterical female defined solely by her relationship with Frank. Forcing herself to extremes, April is either electrified by her husband (“You’re the most beautiful thing in the world—a man”) or disgusted by him; she will turn him into a god or destroy him, and Winslet keeps her back rigid, her shoulders high, her jaw set. DiCaprio, by turns cocky, supplicating, and enraged, gets the externals right, but he seems a little afraid of revealing the depths of Frank’s shallowness. Frank is a liar, an adulterer, and a compromiser who betrays himself as much as his wife, but DiCaprio projects a natural heroic sweetness—it’s in his movie-star genes—which, in this case, is at odds with the character he’s playing. If you think of Paul Newman’s acid moments in “The Hustler” and “Hud,” you can imagine how the role might have been done.”