Revolutionary Road

Francois Duhamel

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Revolutionary Road.'

Drama about a couple's tense marriage in the 1950s. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet. Director: Sam Mendes. (1:59). R: Language, sexuality. At area theaters.

As a whole, Sam Mendes' film of "Revolutionary Road" comes close but falls short of capturing Richard Yates' terrific novel.

Yet in pieces and in spirit, the many honest parts of this drama about marital life in the 1950s are like the rooms of a house that feel right, even if the exterior slopes somewhat clumsily.

Yates' 1961 book dissected America's postwar promise, soul-killing suburban life and the self-delusion within marriage so sharply that the movie — two-thirds "Mad Men," one-third "American Beauty," with a John Cheever chaser — works best when focusing on the personal.

Thankfully, it's there that Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe catch some of Yates' weighty ideas, and where Leonardo Di-Caprio and Kate Winslet succeed in doing the heavy lifting.

DiCaprio is Frank Wheeler, a commuting Connecticut man of 1955 whose job in a Manhattan office isn't what his wandering soul and intellectually hungry mind were made for.

Or so he says, since when his wife April (Winslet) abruptly proposes moving to Paris, Frank is shaken. What about their two young kids? What about money?

April, who hoped to be an actress before she slammed into societal expectations, has it all figured out. Still, Frank, for all his talk, is comfortable at the end of Revolutionary Road.

Though maybe he's "comfy in the hope less emptiness," as John Givings (Michael Shannon, in a great quirky turn) says. The mentally unhinged son of the neighbor-hood busybody (Kathy Bates), John calls out Frank and April for being untrue to themselves.

April, however, has become accidentally pregnant again. When she suggests alternatives, Frank simply shouts louder, and suggests that maybe it's April who's actually unhinged.

There's much more to "Revolutionary Road" than that, and its beauty is in the details: Frank and April walking silently up a hallway after she performs in a play; the kindness in their manners as they sit for breakfast; the frantic run he breaks into when there's nowhere to go.

Some choices don't work as well as others — an opening flashback to Frank and April's first date might have been more powerful at the end, and their friends, the Campbells, should have been handled less broadly — though they never torpedo the film.

And DiCaprio, round-shouldered and sleepy-eyed, and Winslet, watchful and alert, raise up each other and everything around them.

Never once shadowed by "Titanic," they suggest, often wordlessly, the box the Wheelers have found themselves in. Whereas the novel is told mostly from Frank's viewpoint, the movie is just as much April's, and Winslet, whether fighting back or fighting back tears, is sensational.