I caught Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road today, aka the non-waterlogged reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and while I’ll have more thoughts soon, it bears pointing out that one thing the film definitively proves is that DiCaprio cannot convincingly swear; he’s the anti-Sam Jackson in this regard. It’s not that DiCaprio is patrician, per se, it’s just that whenever he spits out an epithet or obscenity, all the effort is revealed, the intellectual processing of the fact that a not-particularly-fit-for-polite-conversation word is about to be deployed, and always the weight of its intended effect. Sometimes this doesn’t matter, in the case of a character who is manipulative in just such a fashion. When it’s a lover’s quarrel, however, this marble-mouthed properness is a problem, since it runs counter to a lot of profanity. I don’t know if it means that he smokes weed (I tend to think not), but there’s just no verbal instinctuality or knee-jerk, hair-trigger impulsivity to DiCaprio.