Revolutionary Road (2008)

Sam Mendes returns to the cul-de-sac of American disappointment, and this time the despair is period-accurate. Revolutionary Road is a faithful adaptation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel, and it plays as an autopsy: a marriage laid open on the table while the audience watches the instruments go in. DiCaprio and Winslet are excellent, which should surprise no one who saw them freeze to death together a decade earlier. The cast is almost entirely white, a demographic fact of 1950s Connecticut suburbia and not a casting argument. Nothing in the film reaches for a broader social point about race, and nothing about the environment, the body, or the closet intrudes on the Wheelers' private collapse.

April Wheeler's predicament carries a real feminist charge. She is a woman with ambitions and no exit, and Winslet prepared by reading Betty Friedan, which tells you where the sympathies lie. Still, this is a period portrait of entrapment, not a modern sermon. The film observes her cage and lets us feel the bars. It does not turn to the camera and explain them.

The angriest thread is economic. Frank's sales job is a slow death by paperwork, and the suburbs are a well-mown grave. The film indicts the American Dream, though it does so existentially, as a matter of personal suffocation. Michael Shannon's John Givings, fresh from a psychiatric institution, is granted the role of truth-teller, a mild courtesy to the unwell. Otherwise the film prefers devastation to instruction. It ruins a marriage in front of us and offers no lesson at the end. That restraint is the best thing about it.