WRAP up warm with a thick, winter coat and scarf when you watch Revolutionary Road. Sam Mendes’s beautifully crafted adaptation of the novel by Richard Yates chills to the bone with its unflinching portrait of scenes from a disintegrating marriage.

Set in 50s suburban Connecticut, where white picket fences and impeccably mown lawns project an image of suburban bliss to mask the betrayal and regret, Mendes’s film leaves us cold, certainly for the opening hour.A deceptively cosy prologue, detailing the first encounter between Frank Wheeler (DiCaprio) and aspiring actress April Johnson (Winslet) at a Greenwich Village cocktail party, segues into screaming, shouting, tears and recriminations. The disastrous first night of April’s play culminates in a blazing row.

“It’s not my fault the play was lousy,” rages Frank. “It’s sure as hell not my fault you didn’t turn out to be an actress.”

April eventually snaps back, “You poor pathetic little boy – tell me how, by any stretch of the imagination, you can call yourself a man.”

It’s a far cry from when the couple first arrives at the perky little house on Revolutionary Road, full of hopes and dreams. They raise two children and make ambitious plans to move to Paris, where she can take a well-paid secretarial position at a government agency and he can decide what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Neighbour Mrs Givings (Bates) and her husband (Easton) don’t understand Frank and April’s desire to abandon America. Indeed, the only person who shares their worldview is the Givings’s emotionally damaged son, John (Shannon).

Revolutionary Road is technically polished, from Mendes’s deliberately slow direction to the flawless production design, Roger Deakin’s cinematography and Thomas Newman’s moody score with echoes of American Beauty.

Performances are electrifying too, with DiCaprio and Winslet verbally tearing strips off each other, in stark contrast to the last time they shared the screen, and Shannon heartbreaking as a man shattered by electroshock therapy.

Yet we struggle to emotionally connect to Frank and April, misery tumbling from their mouths and sadness etched in every furrow of their brows. Only in the sombre closing frames do we find ourselves moved by their anguish We join Mr Givings in gladly turning down the volume on his hearing aid rather than listen any more.

DAMON SMITH