(Entertainment Weekly) -- In the movies, "the suburbs" are never just a place. They're a state of mind, a mythology we all know in our bones. 

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio share a happy moment in "Revolutionary Road." 

The myth goes something like this: The suburbs are comfortable, maybe even beautiful, but their serenity is rooted in a friendly American conformity, so that the people who live there have to repress their true selves, which will emerge when they drink too much and have affairs, or rage at each other for their dishonesty, which was all caused in the first place by ... the suburbs. 

The best thing about "Revolutionary Road," a cool-blooded and disquieting adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel about a powerfully unhappy Connecticut couple, is that it doesn't end with that rote vision of bourgeois anomie. It only begins there. 

Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) are about 30, with two kids, and both believe they can evade the traps of the existence they've chosen. The year is 1955, and Frank has a New York job that bores him, marketing business machines. He takes solace in feeling superior to his work, and also in his midday martinis and occasional dip into the secretarial pool. April, meanwhile, wanted to be an actress, and still feels she's meant for higher things. Watch DiCaprio and Winslet talk about their reunion » 

Moved to reach for something more, April comes up with a plan: She and Frank will sell their home and move to Paris, where she'll work as a government secretary and he will ... find himself. (It's like a '60s fantasy a decade ahead of time.) "Revolutionary Road" was directed by Sam Mendes, who made the glibly scathing "American Beauty," only here he wants us to share not just Frank and April's misery but the frail reveries that hold them together. 
Who is the director?
Sam Mendes