Big stars, bigger mystery

By Steven Zeitchik

We get that it can be useful to promote the appearance of stars in specialized movies, even if it means sowing some confusion with filmgoers unaccustomed to that type of movie. (Random tidbit overheard outside a Michael Clayton screening last year: "I usually like George Clooney, but why was he so serious the whole time?")

But Par Vantage's ad for "Revolutionary Road," which ran in the New York Times Thursday, takes the play-up-the-star-but-play-down-the-content theme to new heights. No online version that we can find so no art, bu it featured a blank white background with the simple message "Winslet. DiCaprio. Tomorrow." if you didn't know better you might think they were appearing at your local movie theater, not starring in a film playing there.

It's hard, no doubt, to come up with marketing materials for a midcentury, wrenching suburban drama in which an increasingly distant husband and wife go after each other with emotional knives.  And if you've got DiCaprio and Winslet, why not push them.

But does it work to go so far the other way and just flog stars like Winslet and DiCaprio without a word about what they're doing there? And even if it does and you land some filmgoers, wouldn't you then run into a word-of-mouth problem? "I don't know, Gertrude. I kind of liked them in Titanic. But I was expecting more romance here."

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