Road rage

The visual appeal of latest Mendes film is its only attraction | Sam Thielman

Paramount Vantage

This is the second time that British American Beauty director Sam Mendes has presumed to tell suburban Americans about themselves, and in that respect the soulless Revolutionary Road is an improvement. No longer filming screenwriter Alan Ball's snide pokes at the lonely and insecure, Mendes has instead adapted Richard Yates' brilliant 1961 novel about a marriage near collapse.

Hollywood's most expensive couple, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (Mendes' wife), play the raging Frank and April Wheeler. The two actors were Jack and Rose in Titanic more than a decade ago, but Mendes replaces that movie's corniness with a meticulously cruel itemization of every flaw in the lives of a formerly promising couple who can no longer hide from the realization that sneaks up on most young adults: They are not as special as they thought they were.