(UNDATED) Seen any good movies lately? On a transatlantic flight the other day, I saw Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet reunited in “Revolutionary Road”, and Sean Penn portraying San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk in “Milk.”

I’ll be the first to admit that even at 39,000 feet, neither film is all that riveting. What, with in-flight duty-free purchases, lunch, and a little turbulence, you can miss quite a bit. In fact, if they didn’t reboot the in-flight computers three times — forcing me to fast-forward to where they’d stopped — I might not have noticed their sex scenes, violence, and foul language. Still, I would not pay to see either film.

But that’s not the point.

Each movie is about relationships.

Frank and April Wheeler (DiCaprio and Winslet) are trapped in a 1950s Connecticut suburb. She is a failed actress, he a stagnant office worker. She wants the magic back. They decide to move to Paris.

“Milk” opens with 1950s black-and-white newsreels of police raids on gay bars. By the early 1970s, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) has opened a camera shop in the Castro district of San Francisco, where he and his lover landed young and eager after a cross-country drive from New York.

Apples and oranges? Chalk and cheese? I don’t think so.

They’re tied together by one of Frank Wheeler’s lines. He tells April that insanity is the inability to love and relate to other people.

Fifty years ago, relationships were outwardly more ordered. Boy meets girl, girl likes boy. They marry, move to the suburbs, and eventually have two children, a dog and a white picket fence. Perfection is the home-baked pie, the evening with neighbors, and the local theatrical society that meets down at the high school. Lots of folks were shoehorned into that mold.

April convinces Frank to break free. She hatches a plan to move to Paris, where she will work as a secretary and he will be free to dream, think, and write. He buys the idea, and dismisses his New York mistress.

Milk, meanwhile, was coming of age in 1950s New York, as gay men (some married and living in Connecticut) were routinely rounded up and publicly excoriated. He makes the move to San Francisco, and within a few years he manages to get elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as the nation’s first openly gay elected official.

What about the relationships? Well, neither film portrays healthy ones. April and Frank swim separately in a pool of self-involvement. Likewise, Milk is so preoccupied with his political ambitions that his stay-at-home lover hangs himself.

But there are other relationships in these films we need to consider. (Full disclosure: spoiler alerts follow.) You see, April gets pregnant, and self-induces an abortion. Milk turns into the consummate politician, but the very fact of his existence unhinges Dan White, his hard-drinking conservative enemy, so deeply that Milk ends up assassinated.

Which is exactly the point. We often see too many situations like black-and-white 1950s newsreels. The toxic relationships in “Revolutionary Road” and “Milk” end up with Technicolor deaths of live human beings. The red blood dripping onto April Wheeler’s white carpet is the same as that spattered on Milk’s office white walls.

Both deaths come from convictions that rest at opposite ends of the spectrum. Both deaths come because another human being got in the way of a single individual who wanted what he (or she) wanted, regardless of his and her personal nest of relationships to children, to family, to life. Both deaths are the result of a kind of insanity that we need to free ourselves from.

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)