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Kate Winslet has two films out and she has won Golden Globes for both of them. The odd emotional acceptance speech aside, she has plotted her career carefully, choosing interesting films that you cannot imagine other actresses in her age group doing. What’s more, she seems to have cornered a particular type of role: portraying women in various periods that experience life as fully sexual beings, with all the baggage that involves. Winslet also paid her dues to studio films early in her career with Titanic and as a result she’s never really had to make that type of movie since.

In Revolutionary Road, she is reunited with her screen partner, Leonardo DiCaprio and is directed by her husband Sam Mendes. They play April and Frank Wheeler, in this adaptation of Richard Yates novel set in 1950’s suburbia. Out in Connecticut, the Wheeler’s appear to have an idyllic life: a handsome couple with a wonderful house, two young children. Frank has a solid job he commutes to in New York City and April plays the proud housewife, after a failed attempt at a career in acting. As in Mendes’ American Beauty, scratch beneath the surface and middle-class life is an emotional mess waiting to erupt like a burst water main.

Frank hates his job and trundles to his work booth, in memorably shot scenes, with thousands of other identikit commuters and April loathes life in the ‘burbs and laments the loss of bourgeois freedoms; for both of them. Both flirt with infidelity in their own ways. When her plan for them to relocate to Paris, so that he can find his vocation and she can support the family, hits the rocks, their whole existence gets thrown into relief. Lovingly shot with details of 1950’s Americana, this is a strong drama with two fine performances at its heart.

Winslet is moving as an ordinary woman stifled by her circumstances. Her character’s ultimate fate is directed by the life-choices women had in that period. In spirit, she played a very similar role in Little Children. As in the earlier film, the character is not necessarily sympathetic, but feels true to life and well observed. Dicaprio is also fine, tempering his natural charm with the depth of a maturing actor.

Although Revolutionary Road is a picture which people will admire for its acting and handsomely mounted photography — it also feels slightly one-dimensional. You get the impression there was more satire and humour in Yates’ much fêted novel and whilst beautifully constructed, it has a certain shallowness at its core. If it reveals truths, they are miserable ones and you have to ask the question: could April and Frank not have found what they were looking for in America?