With this theatrically designed and controlled adaptation of Richard Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes returns to the American suburbia that was the scene of his triumphant debut 10 years ago. It was a novel I first opened owing to the compelling evangelism of Nick Hornby, who made one of the suicidal characters in his 2005 novel A Long Way Down carry a copy of the book, so that it could be discovered on his corpse - an inspired continuation of the books romantic, self-sacrificial agony. Hornby almost single-handedly triggered a resurgence of interest in Yates, which led very materially to the emergence of this movie, a serious and intelligent response to the novel.
It is 1955, and Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are Frank and April Wheeler, a handsome couple with two children who live in a lovely suburban home within commuting distance of New York. Frank works for a Manhattan computer company; April was once a would-be actress who abandoned these ambitions to be a wife and mother. But Frank's looming 30th birthday and April's humiliating experiment in community amateur theatricals brings on a quarter-life crisis for them both. Frantically rediscovering their bohemian idealism, they hit on an exciting secret plan; they will move to Paris where April will get a lucrative secretarial job and maintain Frank while he figures out what he really wants to do with his life. But Frank's employers choose this moment to offer him a mouthwatering promotion - perhaps impressed with the new aura of confidence born of his imminent departure - and there is something else, too. The glorious, spontaneous lovemaking that celebrated their escape plans is to have a very specific consequence. Just as Frank and April airily announce their rejection of the suburban trap, it tightens its grip round their throats. And whose fault is it?
Marital strife is not a fashionable subject for the movies - perhaps because the stuffy and old-fashioned subject of marriage itself is not so fashionable - and in fact I don't think I have seen such an honest-to-goodness display of crockery-smashing, children-waking argument since Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There are plenty of movies where the woman threatens: "So help me, if you so much as touch me, I'll scream." But not too many where the man actually, tentatively touches her - and she screams. There will be some in the audience who might not have the stomach for this, or think it freighted with precisely the kind of provincialism that Frank and April are trying to reject. But there are real ideas here, ideas about intimacy and our sense of ourselves, about how much of these individual selves has to be abandoned in the service of a marriage, about whether this abandonment is tragic or if marriage is itself a silent, private, preordained tragedy. And Frank's rage and frustration is interestingly countered by April's stillness and coiled reserve.
Kate Winslet really is outstanding. Her confident and harrowing performance dominates and animates this film, while creating a slight emotional asymmetry at its core. Her face, so powerful in its impassivity, yet with unreadable hints of fear and anger, has something massive and monumental about it up on screen, the sculpted form of a Roman empress: like the gigantic marble head of Faustina the Elder, famously unearthed with the colossal statue of Hadrian in Turkey last year. In the opening scene, we see April sobbing with mortification after her appearance in the shamingly awful amateur drama show - shaming because it proves that they are not, as they smugly assumed, superior to their suburban neighbours - but then emerging from the dressing room, having pulled herself together, and doing up the side-zip of her skirt. Mendes contrives a heartbreaking visual rhyme for this moment at the very end, when April undoes this same zip in private for the film's terrible denouement. Intentionally or not, she seems much older than Frank, and when she watches his slim, boyish form at the beach, striding evasively off for a swim, they are almost like mother and son.
Frank and April's summer of dashed hope and ruined plans is excruciating not merely because it forces them to admit an existential defeat, but because it shows them a happiness they would never have known, had they never thought of leaving, and also, crucially, a happiness they would never have had in Paris: a happiness of pure, innocent, happy anticipation. Frank and April's dreams were not simply a Chekhovian yearning for Moscow: the plan was not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility, and the likelihood that their marriage would have been just as unhappy in Paris paradoxically reinforces the agonising plausibility of the dream.
Mendes's movie has probably softened the novels blow, and lessens the importance of the am-dram scene at the beginning - in his final hours, Richard Yates is said to have read this chapter aloud on his deathbed. But it is still a deeply felt, moving and genuinely tragic study of a marriage tearing itself apart.
