There is a scene near the beginning of Sam Mendes’s film of Richard Yates’s brilliant novel about suburban boredom and marital discord when April, the wife of Frank, appears in a dire community theatre production of The Petrified Forest.

April (Kate Winslet, married in real-life to Mendes, as everyone must by now know) has aspirations as an actress and plays a greasy-spoon waitress who dreams of going to France. It is obvious, even to Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), that she won’t make it in the theatre. But it is also obvious that, even if she doesn’t, April wants to make something of herself other than a Connecticut housewife.

So, like the waitress in the play, she decides it would be a great idea to leave her comfortable suburban life in the misnamed Revolutionary Road and take her husband and two children with her to Paris.

There, she could support him while he finds a job by working as a translator at the American Embassy. The plan is “to live life as if it matters”.

It seems a good idea even to Frank, who has joined the morning rush to work, suited and behatted, out of Grand Central Station (since this is the Fifties) and is beginning to become aware that life offers something a little more exciting than that march into oblivion accompanied by martinis after work and constant cigarettes.

He is, however, shallower than his wife and by this time there is, anyway, an empty space at the centre of their relationship, so when promotion comes his way, involving a deal more money, he begins to have his doubts. The marital bickering earlier hinted at now follows and flares into flaming rows.

Maybe Frank knows he will be neutered whatever he does. Maybe he is just in a state of funk. But the Paris venture looks increasingly impossible and the only risk he feels inclined to take is a desultory affair with an admiring young woman from the office (Zoe Kazan, who contributes a beautiful little cameo of another lost soul).

But, of course, it is Winslet and DiCaprio we are asked to watch closely. Winslet, in particular, displaying all the misdirected passion of April’s flailing character, gives a performance that puts her right up there with our best actors.

She has to be careful not to overdo things and never does, even when April’s nerves are at full stretch. Let us hastily forget the embarrassing mess she made of her acceptance speech when finding herself best actress at the Golden Globe awards but perhaps remember the fact that it can’t have been all that easy working under the direction of her husband for the first time.

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DiCaprio, her partner in Titanic, can’t match her for sheer watchability but he has improved vastly as an actor even if those starry, still youthful looks are a bit of a handicap.

There is, though, another really excellent performance in the movie, from Michael Shannon, Oscar-nominated as best supporting actor for his portrayal of the mentally disturbed son of the couple’s estate agent friend (Kathy Bates).

Invited to dinner with Frank and April, together with his anxious parents, he asks all the questions the couple have avoided about the efficacy of their Paris pipedream and provides suitably acid answers. He is like some idiot savant who knows the score better than they do and, after 37 shock treatments in hospital, he is able to give a devastating shock back to the warring couple. The party thus ends in near-farce.

The jolting ending, which I can’t give away, has its problems, and we strangely see little or nothing of the children. Nor is Revolutionary Road directed with more than a modicum of cinematic imagination. Its chief delights lie in the way Mendes marshals his actors, its impeccable Fifties production design and Roger Deakins’s cinematography which, as usual, enhances the look of the film without drawing attention to itself.

Yates, who wrote the 1961 novel and has been called the voice of the post-war age of anxiety, perhaps had less sympathy for Frank and April than Mendes. But the book is not tampered with unduly, for which virtue we should surely be grateful.

Mendes spells out the couple’s delusions and orchestrates their ferocious attacks upon each other with great skill, aided by a screenplay from Justin Haythe that tries hard to convey the way in which Yates burrows into the hearts and minds of two people incapable of living well, together or alone. The book and the film may be nailed to their Fifties period (everyone seems to smoke perpetually) but what Revolutionary Road says about not so quietly desperate lives is still appropriate today.