Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio, left) and his wife, April (Kate Winslet), star in the film adaptation of the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. (Francois Duhamel/Paramount Vantage/Associated Press)

I’m guessing that Sam Mendes lives downtown. The first film he directed, American Beauty (2000), portrayed modern suburbia as only a slightly less appealing place to live than, say, the Houston Astrodome during a hurricane. With Revolutionary Road, Mendes commutes again. The film, austere and bleak and very good, could be regarded as an American Beauty prequel. Or at least the foundation for the common value held by most moviemakers, which is that certain area codes are good only for soul-suckage and the occasional Home Depot run (see: Little Children, The Babysitters, and so on).

Austere and bleak and very good, Sam Mendes' new film, Revolutionary Road, could be regarded as an American Beauty prequel.

There’s something distasteful about how “suburb” has become cinematic shorthand for “spiritually bankrupt.” I live in downtown Toronto, and let me tell you, conformity rules. There are so many pairs of gigantic sunglasses and Frye boots in the streets that the local hipsters might as well be wearing identical orange jumpsuits styled by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Still, I’m pretty certain those are just externals, and that humans live complicated, full lives in all boroughs.

Richard Yates’ 1961 book, Revolutionary Road, is often slotted next to the Cheever school of mid-century writing from the Age of Anxiety — just another get-me-outta-here suburbia hate-on. But if one reads the novel now, it actually props up a more sympathetic view. Yes, Yates tells the story of a married couple living miserably in the suburbs, but they’ve imported their own pain and dysfunction from the city. Damaged people aren’t merely the products of real estate.

Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) is just 30 and already living the post-Second World War American dream: house in Connecticut, job in New York City and a beautiful wife, April (Kate Winslet). Less picture perfect are the slow cracks in April’s mental state. The couple met young and in their boho phases. She aspired to be an actress; he did odd jobs and got girls by talking about the meaning of life. A youthful affair ended with a pregnancy and soon, they found themselves cast out of the West Village, living in a bedroom community with two kids and a lawn big enough to drown in.

Mendes, who has a background in theatre, relishes the impact of a beautiful tableau, and he creates scene after scene of stylized, oppressive 1950s flawlessness. When Frank goes off to his job at a generic office supplies company, he rises from the steps of the train station, just one body in a heaving sea of resigned manhood, all grey flannel jackets and hats. April’s very different isolation is gorgeous to behold, too: she takes out the garbage in a swaying A-line skirt and apron, and looks up and down her perfect little street to find there’s no one there. The only movement is the wind rustling the trees, hinting at an encroaching wilderness.

And so the couple fight, and their fights are colossal and verbally lacerating, with each party projecting their own failures onto the other. Yates’ clear, colloquial language gets a full workout in these devastating rounds, which measure just how low lovers can go. “You’re not a man,” cries April, and Frank goes berserk, slamming his fist into the car. The flash of smug satisfaction on April’s face as he yowls in pain tells us we’re watching a dance these two perform regularly: the banality of marital disintegration.

Frank is dissatisfied with his job at a generic office supplies company. (Francois Duhamel/Paramount Vantage)

To save them, April concocts a plan to uproot and relocate to Paris. Frank, somewhat nervously, consents. Both are attached to the idea of predestined greatness, as if they are somehow above their lives, too special to be a stripe in the beige suburban rainbow. The “plan” reinvigorates the marriage, but of course, living in the dream of Elsewhere is a different kind of falsehood. The superficiality of this scheme, even its cowardice, is pointed out by John Givings (Michael Shannon, who delivers one of the best supporting performances of the year), the son of a high-strung, nosy real estate agent (an unnecessarily unsympathetic Kathy Bates). John appears for lunch, picking at the finger sandwiches and muttering to himself, but he soon becomes the film’s conscience, a sage with logorrhea about “the hopeless emptiness” in a place of restraint and constraint. John is, of course, insane, just released from a mental institution, and his presence shakes the Wheelers to the core.

Both the book and film take place on the eve of second wave feminism, and April’s rudderless, identity-free existence doesn’t have a name yet; it will take Betty Friedan, in 1963, to identify the plague of discontent felling housewives in The Feminine Mystique. April’s misery may quietly exist in the shadow of what’s coming next, but Mendes doesn’t delve deep into the kind of broad social satire of television’s Mad Men, where housewives regularly disintegrate. There, our pleasure is in watching the racist, sexist characters march obliviously towards the precipice of the late ’60s.

Revolutionary Road is not as moored to its historical moment; there’s actually a timelessness to the psychological portraits Mendes paints. We watch the lit fuse that is Frank and April’s relationship, wondering just how many compromises they can make, how cornered they have to feel before the inevitable explosion.

For Frank, there are options. As he wakes up to his potential at work, or measures his attractiveness in an office flirtation, the world is open to him in a way it simply isn’t for April. She leans towards madness not only because she’s an American woman trapped in the suburbs in 1961, but also because there’s something wounded and jittery inside her, something wrong. (Of course: the chicken or the egg .…) April’s realization of just how limited her options are — this is a feminist movie, if feminism is about choice — becomes the film’s devastating final act.

Of course, some people will go see Revolutionary Road in the hopes of recapturing a bit of the youthful stardust of Titanic, Kate and Leo’s last film together. Those expecting to be transported by that kind of old-fashioned movie magic will walk out of Revolutionary Road entirely bummed. This dead-end road is where those star-crossed lovers might have ended up if the ship hadn’t gone down. Here they are, older and wiser, barely afloat in a different kind of tragedy, less epic and far more common.

Revolutionary Road opens Jan. 2.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.