What is the point of Leonardo di Caprio?

Rating: 6/10 (21 January 2012)

Sam Mendes 'American Beauty' was in my opinion overpraised: the script, a satire on suburban life, had its share of funny and perceptive moments, but ultimately pulled its punches. The director is back on the same territory with 'Revolutionary Road', only this time, his story is set in the 1950s. The look and feel of that decade is immaculately reconstructed (though were American kitchens really this modern?), but the tale is sadly simpler than his previous film, and amounts to little more than the assertion that suburban life is rubbish, even for the prosperous. There are few unexpected twists to the script, a ponderous and over-present background score, and to make it worse, Leonardo di Caprio plays the male lead. I can understand that when he was younger, women found him cute; but as an adult actor, he never fails to disappoint, decorating every role he with the same self-important whining. To me, he's an unappealing protagonist and fails to command my sympathy. The truth is, not everyone can direct films for a living, and if you can't, a life in the suburbs is probably as good as any. Of course, that's not to say that everyone is happy there; but the darkness in human hearts does not come from real estate and a garden, and I didn't see much insight into the deeper causes here.