Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the film/FRANÇOIS DUHAMEL/DREAMWORKS LLC

By CHARLES McGRATH


Richard Yates’s 1961 novel,“Revolutionary Road,”is far from the kind of book that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-“Titanic”outing together. For one thing, the book is set back in the mid- 20th century - an era that was thought to have about as much entertainment potential as the Bronze Age. The story requires armies of boring commuters to disembark in Manhattan every morning. The characters drive boatlike cars, and everyone drinks and smokes too much - even pregnant women.

Nor does it help that“Revolutionary Road”is among the bleakest books ever written. It ends unhappily, with a gruesome death, and neither of the main characters is entirely likable to begin with. Partly autobiographical, the novel tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who in the mid-1950s move with their two children to the suburbs.

On no particular evidence the Wheelers consider themselves full of unrealized potential. Frank works for Knox Business Machines at what he calls“the dullest job you can possibly imagine,”but thinks of himself as an intellectual, an“intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.”

April has theatrical aspirations, and it’s she who comes up with the solution to their depressing lives: they’ll give up everything and move to Paris, where she’ll get a well-paying secretarial job until Frank“finds”himself. For Frank, who has meanwhile begun an affair with a young woman at the office, the plan is an agreeable fantasy, but April is in deadly earnest about it, and the marriage proceeds to unravel with the inexorableness of Greek tragedy.

“I’m pretty surprised it ever got made,”Blake Bailey, Yates’s biographer, said recently about the movie version, which opened December 26 in the United States and will open in January and February worldwide.“It has long been an ambition in Hollywood to make a movie that’s the last word on postwar suburban malaise, but like any highly nuanced work of literary art,‘Revolutionary Road’is awfully hard to translate onto the screen.”

By all accounts, that the movie did get made is owing mostly to the drive and enthusiasm of Ms.Winslet, who liked the script from the moment she read it.“I loved the emotional nakedness, the brutal honesty about what can sometimes happen in a marriage,”she said in an interview.

She began lobbying Mr.DiCaprio, she recalled, after slipping him the script over coffee, and she also worked on Sam Mendes, the director. He was an easier sell in some ways, because he happens to be her husband.“I just told him,‘Babe, you’ve got to do this,’”Ms.Winslet said.

What none of the principals knew then is that for all its gloominess, or maybe even because of it,“Revolutionary Road”is a novel cherished by a passionate and protective coven of admirers. They appreciate its honesty, its uncompromising exactness, the austere beauty of its prose.

But despite its many champions, the book has slipped in and out of print, never quite catching on with a wider audience.

“The book is very cinematic in some ways,”said Justin Haythe, the screenwriter.“But it never occurred to me that it could be a viable business proposition,”Mr.Haythe went on.“You’ve got the ending, the whole outlook of the book.”

Everything changed, he said, when Ms.Winslet and Mr.Mendes took an interest, and once Mr.DiCaprio came on board the movie almost immediately went into production.“The way you make a movie like this, it turns out,”he said, laughing,“is you get Kate, Leo and Sam.”

Mr.Haythe’s original screenplay was a faithful and at times literal adaptation, using great chunks of Yates’s own language. Mr.Mendes, he said, urged him to give it more shape.

“Sam’s a very visual guy, and he kept saying,‘What does it look like?’”Mr.Haythe recalled.“Sam got me to focus on this as a tragic love story, and the big challenge was to find ways to externalize all the things they don’t say to each other.”

When he picked up the novel after first reading the script, Mr.Mendes recalled, he found it compelling.

“The book is very particular in its insights into what people are thinking when they’re saying the opposite,”he said.

He added that a number of early viewers of the movie, including Yates’s daughters, had approached him to say: You didn’t mess it up.

“That’s meant to be high praise,”Mr.Mendes explained,“but I think it’s really a sigh of relief. There are a lot of great books, but somehow this one is different. If you make a film of‘War and Peace,’people don’t come up to you say,‘You better not mess it up.’I’m glad I didn’t know about this at the beginning, or I think I might have just frozen.”