Revolutionary Road Review

Sam Mendes films the Wheelers' 1955 Connecticut house like a set they are both trapped inside and performing for, and Roger Deakins keeps the camera at a polite distance until the fights start. The picture is strongest when it stops arguing. Kate Winslet's April, standing at the stove in the last morning sequence and making breakfast with a calm that reads as terrifying, is the best sustained stretch of acting here.

Michael Shannon, as the mathematician on leave from a state hospital, says the things the script has been circling and somehow avoids becoming a pure device, though the film leans on him twice when once would have done. DiCaprio is sharper in Frank's small cowardices, the office affair, the eager retreat into a promotion, than in the shouting, where he pushes into a register that sounds like a performance of rage rather than rage itself.

The screenplay's view of suburban conformity is secondhand too, inherited from Yates and then flattened: the neighbors exist to be shallow, the commuter train to be grey. What survives all of that is the marriage, two people who know exactly which sentence will do the most damage and choose to say it anyway.