In Movies, Let Connecticut Be the Real Connecticut

THE new film “Revolutionary Road” explores a phenomenon of the 1950s: the devastations of suburban conformity. It is set, as is the Richard Yates novel on which it is based, in Connecticut. So there they are, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of “Titanic,” reunited all these years later and out of the water, strolling Sasco Beach in Fairfield. And there’s Leo, as Ms. Winslet refers to Mr. DiCaprio in real life, aboard another old mode of transportation: the Naugatuck Valley Railroad, meant here to represent the unfulfilling commuter life.

Then there’s the unfulfilling life in the woods. In the highly acclaimed recent drama “Rachel Getting Married,” Anne Hathaway, Debra Winger and other Hollywood luminaries show us exactly how, in a Fairfield County retreat, a family brings new meaning to the term dysfunctional. In “Mad Men,” the hit television series about the advertising business, Connecticut is the setting for empty marriage — a tone and message set a few years ago in “Far From Heaven,” a suburban drama starring Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid that offered the added dimensions of homophobia and racial discrimination.

These are among the prominent examples of how, in the new effort to feature ourselves in show business, we have filled out an image of our state that, presumably, the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism may not have had precisely in mind when it pushed the idea of 30 percent tax breaks for production companies, a change that occurred in 2006 and that immediately attracted major producers.

You may argue that this celluloid darkness is a small collective price for instant local stardom, and for the chance for ordinary citizens to sit at the same table (#3) at Joseph’s Steakhouse in Bridgeport where Robert DiNiro and Al Pacino met in the cop thriller “Righteous Kill.”