Revolutionary Road / Director Sam Mendes must really hate the suburbs. The last time he cinematically visited the setting was in American Beauty and we all know things didn’t exactly come up roses for those characters. The picture isn’t any prettier in Revolutionary Road, and even though the time period is the 1950s, Mendes’ image of that residential world is still an inferno of damning, domestic self-destruction. In fact, the marriage of Frank and April Wheeler isn’t about to self-destruct, it’s gonna supernova.

Within five minutes of seeing them on the screen, they have already had a screaming match on the side of a highway that ended with Frank pounding the roof of his car. And that’s the tamest of their dramas. Together for the first time since Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play the unhappy couple, both feeling that they missed out on their youth by having two kids and a house (without the picket fence) before they were 30. They feel trapped, culturally stifled and too intellectual for the other happy homemakers around them—with that much latent tension and simmering derision, something’s bound to give.

The actors are at the top of their game here. The two mega-stars manage to create electric anti-chemistry for themselves; one gets the feeling that at any moment, Frank’s going to beat April to death with a kitchen chair and she’s going to poison his morning breakfast. For the first time since his turn as Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, DiCaprio plays a completely unlikable, despicable horse’s ass of a human. Winslet has a tougher job here than in the more prestige-y The Reader. She subtly relies on her down-turned mouth and furrowed brow to demonstrate barely concealed discontent; it’s a performance of extreme control that occasionally erupts in genuinely frightening fury. The Academy nominated her for the wrong damn movie.

Best of all, though, is Michael Shannon as John Givings, the son of a neighboring couple, fresh from electro-shock therapy at the insane asylum (at least the Academy got that one right). Initially brought over to meet the Wheelers to spend time with people his own age, he’s miraculously the voice of reason with his direct questions to the haughty couple. He reads their pomposity and pretentiousness with an almost psychic sense of accuracy and calls them on it, becoming the catalyst to the story’s devastating finale.

Mendes’ directing is just as restrained as wife Winslet’s acting. No surreal scenes of windy plastic bags and dream sequences of ingénues floating in rose petals. There’s not even an omniscient narrator in the room. He relies on Justin Haythe’s practical, mature, no-frills script—an achievement for a screenwriter whose only other credit is the small Robert Redford film The Clearing. The story gets streamlined from Richard Yates’ acclaimed novel and everything excluded from the source material actually works in the film’s favor, heightening the sense of claustrophobia the couple feels.

Revolutionary Road is the most genuine, yet almost operatic, portrait of the suffocating evils of suburbia since Little Children, and the most jolting, over-the-top disintegration of a car crash of a marriage since The War of the Roses. Except there isn’t a laugh in sight.

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