Though he is a three-time Academy Award nominee for his diverse roles in Blood Diamond, The Aviator and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, DreamWorks Pictures' Revolutionary Road marks the first time Leonardo DiCaprio has played a husband and father. To bring his character, Frank Wheeler, to life would require an ability to simultaneously embody his charisma, his masculine bravado and his terror of failure.
Opening exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4 & Greenbelt 3) starting March 11, Revolutionary Road is an incisive portrait of an American marriage seen through the eyes of Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Kate Winslet). The story of 1950's America poses a question that has been reverberating through modern relationships ever since: can two people break away from the ordinary without breaking apart?
Says screenwriter Justin Haythe: "Leo plays Frank in a way that you can see all his potential and smarts but you also understand that he shares many of our own darker qualities: the way things eat at him, the nature of his underlying anxieties, the way he winds up finding himself becoming his own father."
For DiCaprio, it was the story's complexity, both in the Richard Yates novel (from which the film is based) and the screenplay, that got under his skin. "I'd never read anything like this before about two characters who aren't heroic, who aren't victorious at the end of the day, but are just two people desperately trying to make things work," he says, "and struggling with what they believe their lives should be."
He was also drawn to the period, as much for what it said about the present as the past. "The ‘50s era seems so different and bizarre when you look back at it. But at the same time we've held onto a lot of the same moral feelings that we still connect with—about what the American dream is, what a family is supposed to do, what the American lifestyle is supposed to be, how a family is supposed to act and react to each other," DiCaprio observes. "That was the starting point of the moral code we have now."
DiCaprio was further intrigued by the challenge of peering deep into the complexities of a marriage. "The dynamic between Frank and April is so powerful and realistic, you feel like you're a fly on the wall watching an intimate relationship disintegrate," he says. "But you also see that our characters are completely in love and re-energized with each other—until the realities of the life that we've chosen creep back in. So it's a really full psychological portrait of a relationship."
Most of all, DiCaprio was looking forward to exploring these depths with Kate Winslet. "We've been very dear friends for a long time so I felt we could bring something out of the dialogue of these two characters that would be very realistic, very raw and intense," he says. "I knew we could bring that out in each other and I think she knew it, too. There's a real trust factor that allows us to push each other. And I've never seen an actress who cares as much about making not only her performance better, but everyone's performance and the movie better, as Kate."
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