Kazan and Dano in Ruby Sparks.

If you’re an actor looking for work, it helps to have a girlfriend who is a writer. So Paul Dano, whose dour, limburger face is matched only by a charisma that is the screen equivalent of road kill, is a lucky fellow. His roommate and offscreen squeeze, Zoe Kazan, has provided them both with the screenplay to Ruby Sparks, an engaging if lightweight romcom directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team that hit pay dirt with Little Miss Sunshine. This one passes the time pleasantly enough, but history isn’t likely to repeat itself. The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film—separately or together. I kept wondering, while glancing at my watch, what it would have been like with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, or James Wolk and anybody.

The morose Mr. Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a shy novelist in horn-rimmed glasses who wrote a best-seller at 19 but now suffers painfully from writer’s block. Well, naturally; it’s ten years later, and he doesn’t even own a computer. So emotionally underdeveloped that his shrink (welcome back, Elliot Gould) gives him a fuzzy stuffed toy to cuddle with on the couch while he’s being analyzed, Calvin is awkward, socially inept and unable to get laid. So along comes a girl he calls Ruby Sparks, who falls in love with him faster than he can speed-dial his own cell phone. There’s just one snag. She exists only in his imagination. What happens next comes from the filing cabinet reserved for discarded Twilight Zone episodes. She moves into his house, his bed and his kitchen, invading every space. The only person he can confide in is his sympathetic brother, Harry (handsome Chris Messina, who looks nothing like Paul Dano). “She’s like Harvey, except she’s not a giant rabbit!” Ruby (played by the wide-eyed Ms. Kazan, who neglected to write herself the best part) can eat, sleep, walk, talk, make love and stage domestic arguments, and Calvin adjusts to his first affair with adoring acceptance. But after a corny, contrived falling-in-love montage of zombie movies, penny arcades and video games, Ruby starts materializing. Other people start seeing her, too, including the doubting Harry. But instead of fulfillment, she starts challenging Calvin’s well-ordered male supremacy. On a weekend in Big Sur with his bohemian mother (a criminally wasted Annette Bening) and her younger lover (ditto Antonio Banderas), Ruby wins everyone over and becomes the opinionated, fun-loving life of the party. Back in Los Angeles, she gets bored, begins spending the night at her old apartment, partying with a new group of friends and seeking her own independence. This is not what Calvin had in mind, so he starts re-writing his character. Ruby is transformed, according to the sentence he just typed, and returns, clinging to him more than ever. Her actions, thoughts, opinions and moods are all controlled. When she feels sad, he writes her happy. If Ruby starts to leave, he writes her needy and dependent. All of which gives Ms. Kazan a wide spectrum of moods to play. Who wouldn’t crave a relationship you can modify just by writing a new paragraph? But alas, what happens when your creation develops a mind of its own?

Ms. Kazan, granddaughter of the great Elia Kazan, oddly shows little cinematic technique as an actress, but as a writer she has penned a whimsical view of male self-absorption and obsessive egotism as droll as it is shrewd. It’s still a movie with no payoff (even the epilogue smacks of refried Rod Serling), and the fanciful conceit goes nowhere fast. Ruby is like Ryan Gosling’s inflated sex toy in Lars and the Real Girl. The difference is that she can walk the dog, wax the floor and scramble eggs. But she eventually grows just as tiresome as the puppet who wants to be Pinocchio. The movie is sweet, but it’s a lollipop of whimsy. Lick it and it’s gone.

rreed@observer.com

RUBY SPARKS

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Zoe Kazan

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris

Starring Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan and Annette Bening

1/4

Ms. Mulligan, Ms. Williams, Ms. Dunst.

“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown.

It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Shame, a sexually violent fantasia in which Mr. Fassbender beds scores of random women in every dirty corner of Manhattan—including a few times against the floor-to-ceiling windows in the rooms of the hotel we were standing atop.

What better venue for the after party?

“This hotel …” the actor said. “I was staying in the rooms, once, and was told, ‘Beware! People can see inside.’”

Mr. Fassbender lit a cigarette and sat down at the table next to three of his oldest friends—buddies from his youth in County Kerry, Ireland. He had insisted on a roundtable conversation.

“How much of the sex was real?” we asked.

Here’s some context: Shame’s tamer scenes, which conceal nothing from the camera, find Mr. Fassbender engaging in sex under the Williamsburg Bridge, sex with prostitutes, sex with random men in a cavernous clubs, and of course sex in rooms at the Standard, for the entertainment of pedestrians on Little West 12th. (Don’t worry—things get wild toward the end.)

“Um, next question,” Mr. Fassbender said. “Now you gotta ask my mates one!”

“What was it like watching your buddy have more sex than you can ever imagine?” we asked.

“Unfortunately I haven’t yet seen his crown jewels!” one of them said. “I haven’t seen the film.”

“It’s really something,” The Observer responded.

“What is?” Mr. Fassbender asked, taking a last drag. “My crown jewels?”

“Well, I meant the film is really something,” we stuttered. “But, yeah, I have seen them now, I guess.”

“But I haven’t seen yours!” he shot back.

Mr. Fassbender downed his martini—his character, Brandon, was fond of the same cocktail, we remembered—and revealed that he hadn’t been with these guys, his closest friends, since 2001.

“We needed a significant break after we had a go at it,” said one of the friends.

Then they all started chiming in.

“We can only see each other every 10 years.

“I just got over it.”

“The shaking just stopped.”

“But we did a road trip together!” Mr. Fassbender interrupted. “And we were gonna call Marco’s ass up in Italy. Why didn’t we do that?”

“Because we were constantly drunk and we had the memory of a fucking goldfish!”

“Ah, that’s right.”

Steve McQueen, the film’s director, chose the Boom Boom Room for the film’s centerpiece scene, in which Carey Mulligan, playing Mr. Fassbender’s chanteuse little sister, sings “New York, New York” as the camera refuses to waver from her mascara-heavy eyelids.

“A lot of New Yorkers live in the sky, work in the sky, spend their time in the sky,” Mr. McQueen had noted during the postscreening Q&A. And when we spoke with him at the Boom Boom Room, it was up against the glass, with the docks and piers dangling out below us.

“This is the first time I’ve been back since we shot here …” he said. His eyes wandered downward. “The view, the expanse of water!”

After another drink next to a table where Olivia Wilde sat with Zoe Kazan, it was time to go. The cast cleared out too: this was just a small respite from the go-go of anyone involved in the New York Film Festival, where the fall’s slew of Oscar-bait pictures make their first impressions on filmgoers.

Two days later, another bash was underway at the Hudson Hotel in honor of Michelle Williams, who plays the blonde bombshell of the title in My Week With Marilyn.

“Does she pull off Marilyn Monroe?” Harvey Weinstein was asked. He was standing next to an enormous tin water pitcher that decorated the hotel terrace. “Well, see the film, then let me know. Me? Oh, I think she definitely pulls it off.”

Ms. Williams was herself at the party, but at Alice Tully Hall later that night she was Ms. Monroe—My Week With Marilyn is, after all, a film with actors playing actors. As we sat down for the screening, buzzed on a Negroni impetuously purchased from a Lincoln Center lobby cocktail cart, Ms. Williams-as-Marilyn began dancing on the screen-within-a-screen, as Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Olivier sat in his own theater puffing on cigarette after cigarette. If only!

And all of this after our festival began with the earth caroming into a much larger planet in a deafening bonanza of fire—twice, actually—in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which premiered last Monday. It’s a glorious dismantling of terrestrial cores and emotional cores, an expansive vision set to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

And it wasn’t even the only end of the world going on. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, which also premiered at the festival, ends as you’d expect, and takes place on the Lower East Side. Oddly, on our way to My Week With Marilyn, we witnessed a plane etching the words “LAST CHANCE” across the sky.

Yet, despite Melancholia’s global destruction, the cast managed to make it to the Stone Rose Lounge for the after-party. (Mr. Von Trier, who infamously referred to himself as a Nazi when the film opened in Cannes, didn’t make the trip—then again, he’s never been to the United States.)

“I would definitely be with my family for sure,” Alexander Skarsgard, who plays Kirsten Dunst’s doltish (and doomed!) new husband, said to The Observer of his doomsday plans. “Where else would you want to be?”

“I don’t know, man” Ms. Dunst said to us. “I’d hopefully be with my family. It would be nice to be in the forest somewhere, chilling out. It’s such an awful thing to think about. What would you do?”

We told her we’d probably try to have a last night of fun.

First though, there were trays of truffle grilled cheese bites to eat, and DeLeon Tequila apple cocktails to down. The end would have to wait a little longer.

nfreeman@observer.com

Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

THE SUN HAD NOT GONE DOWN outside the Gramercy Park Hotel when Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan started talking about their leather.

“It’s the fucking leather,” Ms. Mulligan said, touching Ms. Kazan’s slit-laden Valentino dress.

Ms. Kazan made a deep purring noise and knocked her pointed heels at the ground.

“You’ve never done that,” said her boyfriend, actor Paul Dano. “I like that…”

“You could do some serious damage with those shoes,” The Observer pointed out.

The actress flung a mischievous look back.

“Don’t you think I’m not thinking about it.”

“She’s so spiky when she’s wearing leather!” Ms. Mulligan, also in Valentino, said. “I’m wearing demure leather.”

“I’m demure with my—”

“There’s nothing demure about that dress.”

Ms. Kazan and Ms. Mulligan had come to the hotel for the Lincoln Center Institute’s Junior Spring Benefit, which they were hosting with Rightor Doyle, Mamie Gummer and Lily Rabe, other regally cumbersome names that catch eyes when they pop up in playbills and film credits.

As the rest of the committee found their seats among the faux-botanical terrace above the penthouse, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan, along with extra man Mr. Dano, had happened to walk outside as The Observer made a late arrival.

“Is that a prop?” Ms. Kazan asked us, grabbing at the magazine in our jacket pocket.

The Observer explained that we were enjoying an article on Arthur Rimbaud.

“That’s pretty gay,” Ms. Kazan said.

“Carey,” The Observer redirected, “aren’t you in a book adaptation coming up?”

“What book adaptation?” Ms. Kazan gasped.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby.”

“Oh my god that’s amazing!” she said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

The future Daisy Buchanan said filming would start in September, in director Baz Lurhmann’s home country of Australia.

“In Australia, that’s where the book is set, right?” Ms. Kazan said.

Ms. Mulligan nodded.

“It’s a great Australian novel.”

Eventually, the crowd of women grew, all of them seemingly in Valentino. (Was that a photographer in Valentino? A server in Valentino?) They greeted their fellow league board members, hugged, pecked on the cheek. Lunch plans were made.

“Do you want to go to the Colony Club?” said a young woman to a few other women, over cigarettes. “We’ll have the best table. Considering you’re my only friends who are members, we should probably go.”

And later, The Observer found a piece of jewelry.

“That was my grandmother’s!” Ms. Kazan informed The Observer, as we plucked a silver and opal bracelet from the ground and fastened it to her wrist.

It was time for dinner, but before they could sit down, Ms. Mulligan and Ms. Kazan had to have one more talk about their Valentino dresses.

“You’re not allowed to wear anything but leather,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I really like leather, Zoe.”

She again started grinding and smacking her heels.

“Yeah, yeah, lean over,” Ms. Kazan said to Ms. Mulligan.

“I think it’s bend over,” said Mr. Dano, suggesting the more common parlance.

“Lean over!” Ms. Kazan repeated. “Lean over!”

“Bless you!” Ms. Mulligan said, in a high-pitched English church-girl voice. “Lean over, please.”

“Arch your back in the convex position!” Ms. Kazan said.

Mr. Dano, who had not yet addressed The Observer, bent near our recorder.

“Print all that,” he said, smiling.

Green Zone

What's the story: You might not remember this, but back in early 2009, the Iraq war movie that was supposed to vie for Oscar's golden glow wasn't The Hurt Locker... it was Green Zone. The latest collaboration from Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass had plenty of advance buzz, but was bumped from its prime November release date to the not-so-prime month of March, presumably because Universal had such a disastrous 2009; must we remind you of Bruno, Funny People and Land of the Lost? But maybe it was actually moved because the film is a sneaky dud. If the bland "this isn't Bourne, but it kinda is!" marketing campaign didn't confirm that feeling, the middling reviews do. Our Rex Reed says Green Zone is like "outtakes from a much better film (The Hurt Locker)" and that it "should have been made five years ago." That ringing endorsement has us reaching for our Bourne DVDs.

Who should see it: Jason Bourne.

Remember Me

What's the story: Go Team Edward? Robert Pattinson stars in Remember Me, a tale of doomed lovers that gives the Twilight star a chance to prove that he's more than just hair product by allowing him to play the romantic lead in a tale of doomed lovers. Hmm. Lost's Emile de Ravin fills in for Kristen Stewart as his co-star—which would be more fun if she was doing her "Crazy Jungle Claire" routine—but despite mostly bad reviews, we're still kind of interested, if only because of that trailer (thanks to Six Feet Under we'll see anything that uses Sia's "Breathe Me") and reports of a completely out-of-left-field twist ending.

Who should see it: Bella Swan.

She's Out of My League

What's the story: For the record, we've been driving the Jay Baruchel bandwagon since his appearance in Tropic Thunder (take that A.V. Club and the Los Angeles Times!), but even our fandom can't get us excited for the completely generic-looking She's Out of My League. As you can guess from the title, Mr. Baruchel stars as a nerdy airport security guard who meets the girl of his dreams but gets spooked when he realizes she's well above his hotness level. Snore. There's a good chance we wouldn't even watch this thing on Comedy Central.

Who should see it: Justin Long.

Also opening this weekend: Academy Award-winner Forrest Whittaker and America Ferrara star in the Tyler Perry-esque Our Family Wedding; Jon Hamm hops on the big screen in Stolen; and It Girl Zoe Kazan goes all Zooey Deschanel in last year's Tribeca favorite, The Exploding Girl.

We attended a party celebrating Jessica Cutler's (a.k.a. the Washingtonienne) wedding to a nice lawyer at the Tribeca Grand.

Billionaire David Koch told us how he's cutting back this holiday season at the 11th Annual Food Allergy Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. 

We talked with director John Patrick Shanley about his days as a renegade alter boy at a lunch in honor of his new film Doubt. 

At a screening of Planet In Peril: Battle Lines, we talked with host Anderson Cooper about his vacation week plans (he's looking for a story to cover!) and heard about Mo Rocca's idea for the next installment of the CNN special.  

We got to know Seagull and Revolutionary Road actress Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the late Elia).  

Like the 1961 Richard Yates novel it is faithfully adapted from, the film, directed by Sam Mendes, might make you cry. It could very well make you mad. But perhaps most unsettling of all—particularly in this, our new Age of Anxiety, with layoffs and money troubles and the ever-increasing pressure, especially in New York City, to have everything, in spite of it all—it might force you to examine your own life. Revolutionary Road is, in part, a portrait of a marriage. But it is also a dissection of personal failure, of what happens when we disappoint ourselves, when we end up on the road we never meant to travel. As you might imagine, the view from that road, when one really stops to look, is very bleak indeed.

Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple who seems to have it all: genetically blessed looks, charm, adorable children, a sweet, green-lawned house within commuting distance from the city. They’re the shining stars of their block, the enchanting and interesting couple everyone wants to have a drink (or four) with. Unlike the sad sacks in his office, Frank is cut out for bigger and better things, and April is the woman meant to be married to someone like Frank—she’s the unintentional housewife who is different, more intelligent and introspective than the other women planting greenery along their identical drives. Or so the Wheelers liked to think. Thanks to events both in and out of their control, they must confront the people they have actually become out in suburbia, and the cold reality that they will never lead the lives they intended to. And then they begin to disintegrate. Spectacularly.

“I think it’s perfectly possible for human beings to spend a large part of their life convincing themselves that they’re happy,” Ms. Winslet said recently, speculating on why it is that Revolutionary Road will resonate with people so deeply. She was perched on a sofa in the Waldorf Astoria, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and ashing elegantly into a bottle of water. “Ultimately, when reality kicks in and you dare to allow yourself to think that you might actually be living a life that you haven’t planned, or living a life that you don’t want to be living and feel trapped in, then that’s when your problems begin. I think for human beings to feel trapped and isolated and lonely in a life that they thought they were happy in … Well, it’s just a terrible, terrible place to be. I think everyone has been in that place—even if they tell you they haven’t, I think they have. I think there are more people who have been in that place than people who have been blissfully happy forever.”

RICHARD YATES' NOVEL has been, as Richard Ford once wrote, “a secret handshake” among the cultish fans who have fought for Revolutionary Road and Yates (who died in sad circumstances before his work rose to its current acclaim) to take their rightful place beside Cheever, Carver, Updike and Fitzgerald. They praise the book for its deceptively simple and brilliant prose, dark (dark) humor and brutal honesty. Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo was in a Ph.D. program, at what he called the “tipping point” of deciding to be a writer, the first time he read Revolutionary Road. “Most of my fellow graduate school students were excited by the highly experimental, intellectual meta-fiction folks,” he said. “I thought those things were interesting, but I was looking for something else entirely. It was Richard Yates writing about April Wheeler and Frank Wheeler … Those were closer to the people I knew, closer to my experience in life. I knew it was possible for Mark Twain to write about Huckleberry Finn, but I wasn’t sure if in the literary climate it would be possible for me to write about the people I wanted to write about. Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road convinced me that yes, you can write about them and it would be literature if it was good enough.”

Mr. Russo isn’t alone: Yates is often called “a writer’s writer,” and the list of others who have pledged admiration for him include Richard Price, Joan Didion, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Alice Munro. “I feel like it’s a secret society,” said author Elizabeth Strout. “I think for me and for a lot of others, it’s that Yates dares to go there. He takes it all the way. I think it’s brave.”

It was similarly brave for Mr. Mendes (who’s married to Ms. Winslet) to make this film, given the attachment that fans of the book have felt to the Wheelers. Yates’ portrait of their marriage is downright brutal—you may not realize how much yelling goes on in Revolutionary Road until you actually see the film—but there’s some universal truth to the pull of love and hate between Frank and April, and also within them as individuals, that makes their story feel, for lack of a better word, real. The tension is between conforming to societal values—kids, nice house, good job, etc.—and following dreams; between being superficially happy and truly happy.

“You know the thing most people said to me, if they knew the book and knew I was making the movie, was, ‘Don’t fuck it up,’” said Sam Mendes. “And now the highest form of praise I can get is, ‘You didn’t fuck it up!’” He didn’t; Revolutionary Road nails the elemental spirit and tone of the novel, “an ache”—as Mr. Mendes described it. “They’re all sort of longing for something, a yearning, they just don’t know what it is,” he said. 

The screenplay by Justin Haythe (a novelist in his own right) adheres pretty closely to the source material (“It’s like a good hair cut,” Mr. Haythe said. “You don’t want people to notice the changes”), and the performances by Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Winslet are astonishing and accordingly devastating. It’s a hard two hours, and the movie is as emotionally exhausting as the book. For in a Yatesian world, no one is safe. People are weak and trying to pretend—mainly for their own sakes—that they’re not. Photographs don’t capture the person you believe you are. Love isn’t real, but based on shared, fragile illusions. Powder and lipstick and the whiff of martinis and cigarettes cover up sour smells and sweaty desperation. As 2008 draws to a close and we New Yorkers assess the year that was, even if we can put check marks next to the major stuff (spouse, job, kids, a prewar apartment in a good ZIP code, the right preschool, a country house, Tibetan nanny, etc.), we may never escape, completely, the fundamental dread of adulthood. Mainly, what if it isn’t enough?

“I’m a big believer that life is diamond-shaped,” said Mr. Mendes. “Horizons expand and they contract. I think we’ve all at one time or another realized without really knowing it that they’re contracting … and how did that happen? You can’t choose who you marry because you’re married. You can’t choose whether to have kids or not because you have kids. You can’t choose where you live, because you’ve already chosen where you live, and these choices have been made, you know? You wake up and you wonder how I did I get here? It’s a 20th-century malaise expressed with incredible clarity with this book. I think people can relate to it on the level of that moment when, whoever you are, you look at your partner and think, who are you? Who is this stranger who is living in my house? I think that absolute shock of sharing your life with someone who is on some level a complete mystery to you whoever you are … I think it’s universal.”

Last weekend, in a tastefully decorated garden apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a group of seven attractive and well-educated women met for their monthly book club to discuss Revolutionary Road. Their ages ranged from late 20s to mid-30s, a little more than half were married, and almost all of them were lawyers. The hostess had gotten into the ’50s swing of the book and served accordingly: crust-less egg-and-cucumber sandwiches, salmon and crème fraiche bites, gherkins and a glass dish of pickles and, of course, plenty of wine. A discussion of the recession and fear of losing jobs—much like the one taking place at any point anywhere in the city—dominated the first half-hour. Then they delved into Revolutionary Road. Most seemed to like it. A couple said they couldn’t read it without seeing Ms. Winslet and Mr. DiCaprio in their heads. One woman finally leaned forward and said, “Is it O.K. that I didn’t like it? Is that bad?” No, no, no, she was quickly assured. “I’m just so over the whole suburban-bashing thing,” she said. “I didn’t feel sorry for them. What’s the fucking point? Buy a train ticket and go into the city if you’re sick of being stuck at home. Stop complaining.”

“I don’t know,” said another, a mother of two children living in Scarsdale. “I kind of felt like this is so my life.” All of the married women seemed to relate to the rawness of Frank and April Wheeler’s fights. “I’ve never fought like that,” one (lucky) woman said. “I have,” four voices replied in unison. “I don’t know,” the hostess said. “It comes down to accepting what your life is. It’s about being an adult. Life is not what you thought it would be at 19. Suck it up,” she said.

“But isn’t that depressing?” asked the woman beside her.

“READERS OF LITERARY fiction are likely people who identify very strongly and uncomfortably with the typical Yatesian protagonist, who tends to be a well-educated, middle-income, aspiring-intellectual type, who is of course deceiving himself and is really far more mediocre than she or he would like to think,” said Blake Bailey, author of the Yates biography A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates and the forthcoming Cheever: A Life, with considerable frankness. “That is a horrible realization, to identify with such people and their inevitable downfall.”

In Revolutionary Road Frank and April, in an effort to break out of their rut, decide to move to Paris to get away from what Frank calls “the hopeless emptiness of everything in this country”—the 1950s equivalent of the contemporary New Yorker’s desire to chuck it all away for an apple farm in Vermont, a little coffee shop in Buffalo or a ranch in Montana. “When it looked like there was a possibility of a McCain-Palin presidency, there was some talk about France,” laughed Mr. Haythe, the screenwriter. “You don’t have to pretend to being opposed to gay marriage or guns, or the death penalty. Even if you’re unattractive, you’re attractive in Paris.”

But for Frank and April, Paris is more than an ‘escape from the rat race’ fantasy. It’s a last-ditch effort to become the people they always were so sure they would be.

“I think the country and society makes a promise to its people at a very early age that anything is possible,” said Mr. Mendes. “A country that promises can kill people with possibility and potential. Can kill people with the constantly dangled carrot of, life should be better. Life could be better. You deserve more. You are entitled to more.” Mr. Mendes pointed to a moment in the film when April realizes she’s no different than her neighbors. “If you’re good-looking, the world promises you something, and then you lose your looks,” Mr. Mendes continued. “If you’re talented enough to get into a top university but then don’t manage to get the job you want, the world has led you to believe that you are an X when in fact you are Y. At one point, we feel so superior to the people around us, but we’re exactly the same. Everyone is sitting in their own house feeling superior. It’s a very modern idea, that somehow you are the lead character in your own film of your life. But in everyone else’s, you are way in the back and your face is obscured by shadow.”

“There are huge numbers of people who say to themselves, if it wasn’t for this, this and this, I’d be leading this whole other kind of life,” said Mr. Haythe. “And the drumbeat for women to have children is still really strong. There’s this sense of musical chairs; if you don’t get one when the music stops, there’s this anxiety so you grab a chair before the music stops and then you have to live with that person for the rest of your life. For all it’s 1950s-ness, Revolutionary Road is as resonant in 2008 as ever.” 

Mr. Mendes echoed Mr. Haythe. “What struck me about the book when I read it was that there was this immense canvas early on in the story—the streets of N.Y.C. and Grand Central Station, amateur plays and theatrics and these roads of suburbia and the lawns and sprinklers, but gradually, bit by bit, everything was stripped away until it was just a man and a woman slugging it out. Period was forgotten, era was forgotten, community was forgotten, and it was really just a man and a woman, and by inference all men and women.”

In other words, we all, despite our city ZIP codes and subway-riding ways, live on Revolutionary Road. The good news? For some of us, there may still be time to move.

svilkomerson@observer.com

After all, Ms. Kazan—with her big hopeful blue eyes, puffy cheeks and cherubic, heart-shaped face—looked too sweet to play the unfortunately named secretary who puts out for married Frank Wheeler, played by 34-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio. But Ms. Kazan, who was then 23 and a year out of Yale, was determined. “I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes you meet someone and you think, ‘I’m going to know this person,’ and then you end up dating them,” said Ms. Kazan on a recent afternoon at Cafe Colonial on East Houston Street, as she picked at a salad of hearts of palm and grilled chicken. “Well, I sort of felt that way about this part. I thought, ‘This one is for me.’”

At the time, Ms. Kazan—granddaughter of the late director Elia Kazan (her parents are screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord)—already had impressive acting credits. After appearing opposite Cynthia Nixon in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, a few small roles in major films followed: The Savages, Fracture and In the Valley of Elah. She’s currently playing Masha, the vodka-swigging depressive in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

When the Transom lunched with her, Ms. Kazan’s brown hair looked like it had just been taken down from an up-do from the previous night’s Seagull performance. Dressed in black jeans, a plaid shirt, red loafers, glasses and one of her boyfriend’s stained sweaters (which she’d found on the floor that morning), the actress has little in common with Revolutionary Road’s tragically naïve Maureen.

“She’s such an innocent. She really doesn’t know what’s going on and has a very different idea of what’s happening than Frank does,” said Ms. Kazan. “I think I’m definitely better-educated, savvier and, you know, more cosmopolitan than that girl.”

Despite three auditions, in which Ms. Kazan read a scene where her character downs a few expensive martinis (she later ends up in bed with Mr. DiCaprio), Ms. Kazan’s age remained a point of concern. Mr. Mendes invited the actress for a 9 a.m. chat at his office in the meatpacking district.

“I was so nervous that I woke up at 6 in the morning and walked around Lower Manhattan for hours before going in there,” she recalled.

Each time Ms. Kazan had auditioned for Mr. Mendes, she’d dressed up and done her makeup ’50s-style. This time, the director instructed her to come dressed as herself. They were just going to talk, he said. Maybe they would do the scene again; maybe not.

Over a croissant and coffee, Mr. Mendes—whose wife, Kate Winslet, plays Mr. DiCaprio’s wife in the movie—asked Ms. Kazan why she wanted to be an actress.

“I told him the truth, which was that as a kid, I had a kind of excessive empathy,” said Ms. Kazan. “I felt for a lot of people I didn’t know, whether they were characters in a book or I was riding the bus with my nanny. I was like this big, walking heart. So I started acting as having a place to put that.”

His curiosity piqued, Mr. Mendes asked what Ms. Kazan thought of Maureen.

“I think sometimes Yates’ misogyny gets in the way of his empathy,” the actress recalled telling Mr. Mendes. “My main intention in approaching Maureen, as I explained to Sam, was not to judge her, not look down on her, but give her a real chance, you know?”

During that meeting, they never actually got to do the scene again; Ms. Kazan got the part.

In the film, Ms. Kazan pulls off the character well. Her frightened, large eyes play to her advantage; she laughs crassly; and she looks perfectly abandoned when Frank leaves her naked, barely covered by a sheet, and tells her she’s been “swell.”

“It’s been cut down to just a topless scene now, but I’m glad for, you know, my parents’ sake,” Ms. Kazan said (she’d done an excruciatingly long nude scene in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). “Also, it was a really hot day when we were shooting in Maureen’s apartment in Harlem with no air-conditioning, and we were all sticky and blotchy. These were just not the best conditions for, like, a nude scene.” 

After they finished filming the scene (and Ms. Kazan had donned her robe), Mr. DiCaprio hugged her and told her she had done “a good job.” But Ms. Kazan—whose boyfriend is There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine star Paul Dano—wasn’t too star-struck.

“My crushes were more like Humphrey Bogart or Robert Downey Jr. I actually used to write him letters in prison, like, ‘Please sober up, you’re such a good actor,’” she said, laughing. “Not that I ever sent them. Yeah, I was a little weirdo.” 

Ms. Kazan grew up in Venice Beach, Calif. These days she lives in Carroll Gardens (Mr. Dano lives nearby), and isn’t rushing to return to her hometown.

“I love coming home from Times Square and have it be really beautiful and green and having children and families around. If I could stay in Brooklyn all day, I would,” she said. “I think being a young actress in L.A. is not so much fun. I don’t look down on it, but it’s a lot of waiting around. If you’re waiting around in New York, you can walk outside and there are thousands of things to do. In L.A., it’s so isolated and it’s so much more competitive. Also, the whole body image thing—I would rather not engage.” 

Ms. Kazan’s grandfather—the famed director of such celebrated films as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront who passed away in 2003 at the age of 94—rarely discussed his films or Ms. Kazan’s planning to become an actress with her.

“We mostly talked about, like, food and backgammon and baseball,” recalled Ms. Kazan. “I wasn’t really aware that he was famous until I was about 12, and even after that, it just never seemed that important.”

But Ms. Kazan was present at the 1999 Oscar ceremony where Mr. Kazan, who had “named names” to the House Un-American Activities Committee during the blacklist era in Hollywood, was awarded a lifetime achievement award. (Actors Warren Beatty, Meryl Streep and Helen Hunt cheered; Nick Nolte and Ed Harris sat with their arms folded; Steven Spielberg clapped but remained seated.)

“I was 15, with a mouth full of braces and a really bad haircut. It wasn’t exactly a glamour event for me,” she said. Getting serious again, the actress confessed, “It was odd. In the L.A. newspaper, there was a lot of controversy about whether or not he should even get the award, and that was upsetting. Here was a very old man, who was not 100 percent well, and I just felt like, ‘Don’t pick on my grandpa!’”

After The Seagull finishes its three-month run on Dec. 21, Ms. Kazan plans to take January and February off—her first real break in over a year and half—and spend a little more time with the 24-year-old Mr. Dano. (The two met while acting in Things We Want a little over a year ago; in the Playbill for The Seagull, under Ms. Kazan’s name, is a little note: Thanks P.D. for being my center of gravity always.)

“Actors get a bad rep for a good reason—we could be incredibly selfish, eccentric and weird,” she said. “But it’s nice when I come home and I’m sad and he won’t automatically assume I’m upset about something. He’ll know that I’ve been playing Masha all night. So it will be more like, ‘Let me get you a glass of wine and some food and we’ll calm down.’”

She added: “My parents’ only advice when I started dating was, ‘Never date an actor.’ So when I met Paul, I was like, ‘Oh fuck, I didn’t want to meet you!’”

This reminded Ms. Kazan of one of the few times that her grandfather acknowledged her planning to be an actress and gave her some advice. He was visiting her at Yale and met a boy she was dating—a grad student studying poetry.

“Oh, he’s a poet,” Mr. Kazan said to his granddaughter. “He’s not going to be able to support you if you plan to be an actor.”

ialeksander@observer.com

“I’m going to vote early, probably right after my show,” said Live with Regis and Kelly host Regis Philbin, who was one of the earlier departers along with wife, Joy. “I’m just so glad it’s over! This has been the longest election. We’ve been through [Hillary] Clinton and [Barack] Obama—that took a year and a half—but we’re almost there!”

Nora Ephron—who was being honored along with playwright Edward Albee, children’s book author Ashley Bryan, and author Salman Rushdie—was rather excited.

“It’s going to be fantastic! It’s going to be great!” she said of Election Day. “Yes, we’re all going to have to wait on line, but I usually find that in the middle of the day, the lines aren’t so bad. So that’s probably when I’ll go.”

But not everyone among the attendees was carefully strategizing their trip to the polls the following day.

“I’m not a citizen so I don’t have a vote and I feel very frustrated not to have a vote, but hopefully I can join in the celebrating,” said the Indian-born Mr. Rushdie, who is a British citizen. “It’s going to be a long day and a long night, but I think there’s going to be celebration. I’ll definitely be out somewhere tomorrow evening.”

British-Iranian CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who was walking out on the arm of her husband, former Bill Clinton assistant James Rubin, was in a similar situation. “I can’t vote, but I am excited because it’s going to be a remarkable moment in history,” said Ms. Amanpour. “Wednesday will be a very different day not just for this country but for the world. I’ll be out touring the city and getting reactions. I am a reporter after all.”

Former New Yorker editor and Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, who was dressed in a slim-fitted blazer and a long flared black skirt, became a U.S. citizen in 2005 and was generally calm.

“I just don’t think there’s much to be stressed about. It seems like a shoo-in right now, but we’ll see. It would take some cataclysmic change for it to go a different direction,” said Ms. Brown.

Ms. Brown’s successor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, who was walking out of the dinner with his wife, Anna Scott Carter, said he will be watching the election returns at home.

“What’s tomorrow? I love Tuesdays! Oh, you mean voting?” Mr. Carter joked with the Transom. “Yes, I am very excited, that’s why I’m trying to get home early so that I can vote around nine. But where I vote—the West 14th Street Gay and Lesbian Community Center—the lines are not that long.”

But when the Transom asked Mr. Carter what might happen to the city should John McCain take the presidency the following evening, Mr. Carter’s rosy cheeks turned a shade whiter. 

“I don’t even want to talk about that,” he finally replied. “It’s too upsetting.”

The last to trail off were 24-year-old Little Miss Sunshine actor Paul Dano and his girlfriend Zoe Kazan, who is currently appearing as Masha opposite Peter Sarsgaard in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. (The Transom found the young couple snuggling on a bench, to the crooked looks of the older guests.) The couple had already filled out absentee ballots and planned to spend the election evening at a friend’s house in Brooklyn.

“It’s a small get-together so that we can all comfort each other, but generally I feel pretty good about it right now,” said Mr. Dano, an Obama supporter.

Ms. Kazan chimed in: “A bottle of champagne if it goes well and a razorblade if it doesn’t!”