Titanic couple's dubious caper

The ill-fated lovers of Titanic reunite in Revolutionary Road. But this time, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet find their characters run aground in a disastrous mid-1950s marriage.

The initial audience for this critique of the desolation of the postwar American suburbs may be large.

Younger audiences will be curious about the DiCaprio-Winslet reteaming while older viewers might gravitate towards an old-fashioned domestic drama.

Hopeless emptiness

Justin Haythe's script and Sam Mendes's direction hew closely to Richard Yates's 1961 novel and fail to escape the novelist's misogyny and contempt for the suburban.

The phrase seized upon in both works is “hopeless emptiness''.

Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) are individuals born with an innate sense of superiority but no ambition.

So finding themselves married with two children and living in Connecticut, they are frustrated and bored. Her solution: Sell everything and move to Paris, where they will find their inner bohemian.

He likes the idea for a while. Then, when a promotion at his Manhattan firm emerges, he sours on the idea.

Her pregnancy because of bad family planning seems to settle the issue. But Frank hasn't calculated on a stubbornness and selfishness in April worse even than his own.

The Great Paris Getaway scheme is strewn with adulteries on both sides, intrusions by busybodies and the story's own Greek chorus.

Revolutionary Road is essentially a repeat for Mendes of American Beauty, right to the camera compositions, composer Thomas Newman's repetitive music and shocking death at the end.

The suburbs are nightmares and their denizens clueless.

So much for subtlety

This environment clearly attracts the dramatic sensibilities of this director. Indeed, his actors play the subtext with such fury that the text virtually disappears. Subtlety is not one of Mendes's strong suits.

The movie finds its dramatic rhythms in the quarrels between the married couple.

These lack for true wit or appreciation of rhetoric. Yet they are as toxic and desperate as any committed to the screen between a husband and wife.