Uncoupling in the '50s suburbs

A cascade of blond hair, an exhalation of cigarette smoke, the promise of erotic bliss. That's how April (Kate Winslet) first appears to Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Revolutionary Road. Sam Mendes' devastating if flawed adaptation of the Richard Yates novel is, in part, the pipe dream of a gypsy who marries an admirer and sets up camp in the Connecticut suburbs of the 1950s.

When the tobacco is extinguished what comes between April and Frank Wheeler is bigger, colder and more formidable than the iceberg that sundered Kate and Leo in Titanic: shattered hope.

To outsiders over coffee or cocktails, April and Frank are a golden couple possessed of deep beauty and deeper feelings. But the pair who ordered a special life and got delivered an ordinary one are in fact unfulfilled, numb, given to declamations like "I want to feel things, really feel things." The only time they do is when they hurl accusations and ashtrays at each other. (During Wheeler face-offs, the children are conveniently elsewhere.)

Their Technicolor dreams - she was to be a great actress but has failed in community theater, he was to be Somebody but is an Everyman - have given way to khaki reality, hauntingly captured by cinematographer Roger Deakins in shades of putty and greige.

Like the title of the film, which refers to the conformist suburban street on which the Wheelers buy a house "perkily" sited on a sloping lawn, the characters' names are a touch ironic. Frank is not very candid, April no longer springlike.

He commutes to Manhattan, one in a gray wave of business suits, to work at a business-machines corporation where under fluorescent lights faceless men in fedoras pretend to work but are really nursing hangovers. As Mendes frames them in the relentless geometry of offices laid out like graph paper, they are not Mad Men but Sad Men.