Revolutionary Road review

This is a film with serious pedigree: the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet ten years after Titanic, Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes behind the camera, and a script based on an influential novel by Richard Yates, which takes apart the American dream.

The trouble is however, that there is nothing particularly new here. Yates' work comes across as somewhat dated, especially in an era when Mad Men has covered much of the same ground on television - many of the scenes being remarkably similar.

Winslet and DiCaprio are April and Frank Wheeler, a young couple who are the envy of their friends and neighbours. They appear, on the outside at least, to be tremendously happy, with a new house on the eponymous road in Connecticut, golden children, and Frank's comfortable income supporting them.

But in this rather bitter dissection of an apparently blissful domestic situation, the cracks begin to show as we spend more and more time with the Wheelers, away from their nearest and dearest. Frank hates his job, and sleeps around with a girl at the office. April comes to despise the monotony of her cookie-cutter lifestyle and dreams of moving the whole family to Paris and possibly rekindling her artistic dreams. The drama revolves around this quest for happiness, and heavily implies that the American dream is not all it is cracked up to be.

But in the cold light of day it's a simplistic message, not to mention naive. It preaches anti-conformity without giving any form of solution; it implicitly criticises people for just getting by and refuses to countenance the fact that happiness can be found in many different ways.

Kate Winslet won a Golden Globe for her performance, but the real star is Michael Shannon as the lunatic son of the Wheelers' neighbour. He enters as the voice of the author, berating the golden couple for their conventionality. It's a show-stealing turn but rather like the rest of the film it's also one-dimensional.

Paul Hurley