Director Sam Mendes returns to the suburban stamping ground of his filmmaking debut, American Beauty, but at the very opening of that territory in the 1950s, at the inception, that is to say, of all the clichés of cookie-cutter conformity, Little Boxes, the Lonely Crowd, lives of quiet desperation, and so forth. As the central couple — the Wheelers, residing with strident irony at the titular address in Connecticut, the dead end of the American Dream — it must have seemed a bright idea to reunite the lovebirds of Titanic, as if to hint at the illusion-shattering grimness of the married life ahead of them had the iceberg not got in the way. But the birds have matured at different rates in the intervening eleven years. Whether in rage or frustration, cajolement or surrender, Kate Winslet (Mrs. Mendes off screen) appears much too strong for Leonardo DiCaprio, whose perennial boyishness clings to him, dogs him, drags him down, even in, or perhaps especially in, his face-caving moments of total emotional nakedness: “You’re not worth the powder it would take to blow you up!” (Now, now, sonny.) You could wonder, to divide the faultfinding fairly, whether she’s not too strong for her own role. The movie, taking its lead from the Richard Yates novel and then going beyond the novel in search of a present-day perspective, is trying to do something a bit different, and a bit difficult, in suggesting that the would-be free Wheelers are not as superior to, or separate from, their neighbors and surroundings as they would like to imagine, and in nudging the spectators, at the same time, to recognize that they themselves are not as superior as they might suppose to the central couple, the Fifties, their neighbors today. The codified view of postwar suburbia has over the years undergone too much expansion and elaboration for the movie to escape a sense of cliché and sense of hyperbole. But the cliché and hyperbole are done to a turn. And the period and its archaisms (“I must scoot. Toodle-oo”), its formalities and manners (no one but a certified madman, an institutionalized mathematician on a day pass, dares speak the truth in mixed company), combine to produce a stylization that brings out the satire in the piece. Revolutionary Road beats American Beauty, not terribly hard to do, for both seriousness and funniness. Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, David Harbour. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd