Just started reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, and couldn't help but chuckle at this description of the novel's protagonist, Franklin H. Wheeler:
He was neat and solid, a few days less than thirty years old, with closely cut black hair and the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise (Why Pay More?). But for all its lack of structural distinction, his face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.
Leonardo DiCaprio is a fine actor, but his chiseled-by-the-gods visage is a paean to "structural distinction". I'm still quite looking forward to Sam Mendes's film, but I'll continue to read the book with Richard Benjamin circa Goodbye Columbus in mind. Or Charles Bronson in Hard Times. (Seriously, an early '70s Pacino might've worked. Today, I'd go with Kate Winslet's Little Children co-star, Patrick Wilson.)
As for Ms. Winslet as April Wheeler, this isn't nearly as hard to stomach:
She was twenty-nine, a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could distort, and she seemed ideally cast in the role. It didn't even matter that bearing two children had left her a shade too heavy in the hips and thighs, for she moved with the shyly sensual grace of maidenhood; anyone happening to glance at Frank Wheeler, the round-faced, intelligent-looking young man who sat biting his fist in the last row of the audience, would have said he looked more like her suitor than her husband.
Emphasis mine, of course.
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