A dreadful parody of "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit"

Rating: 1/10 (1 February 2009)

The art of storytelling, whether in a play, a novel or a film is to create characters who become real. And once you identify with the characters, their lives become the vehicle for the tone and message of the work. Without such realism, such verisimilitude, there is nothing but parody, and the manipulation of stock figures.
I am a great fan of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so I was looking forward to seeing them in a serious exploration of an era that I lived through as a young man. This work was stunningly without substance. Oh there were emotions, but the characters were not believable, and worse there was no attempt to make it so. The clue is the two children, throw away place holders, so they never even became people. Yet children are a part of any family, and we can't know the family without knowing the joys and trials of these most vulnerable members.
A good test that I use of the quality of any film is whether there are throwaway characters, or if every person seems to have walked in from their own full life. If they only utter a single line, you can still tell. The mental patient visitor was some kind of a joke I imagine. Not like anyone with schizophrenia that I ever met, and I met a few.
And it's not trivial that Frank could never describe exactly what he did for a living. The writers never bothered to create an occupation that would have fit the plot. So he was just a man in a cubicle. A nobody, with no interest in his work, but who was made a key member of a team to develop the most complex product of the era, who had no idea what it did, or how it worked.
Some may consider this transcending details to provide a cultural everyman. But everyman is no man at all.
This wasn't a dysfunctional marriage, as that implies that there is first a marriage. The film "The Squid and the Whale" was about a dysfunctional marriage, where the couple were at each others throats Yet both of them and their children were real unique struggling humans trapped in their history and that of their circle. That was a true work of art, while this was an exercise in a drama class.
For those who think this is some accurate depiction of America in the 1950s, believe me it isn't. If you want to see a film about a dysfunctional couple of the era, try "Come back little Sheba" or "Death of a Salesman." Each of these films created actual characters, and we were drawn into their lives as we learned about the era.
This film was about 2008, and how when two super stars are signed for a film deal there is no need to throw away money on writers who flesh out their characters, and provide plausible circumstances of their lives.
I just learned that the director of this film was the same man who directed, "American Beauty," one of my all time favorites.
Go figure!