Ryan Shorthouse goes down Revolutionary Road, but has seen it all before

We know the story. It’s the same old tale. A young couple fall in love, full of aspirations for the future, but slowly the monotony of bourgeois, suburban life dampens their earlier enthusiasm. It’s obvious what will happen next: frustration with the job, affairs, arguments, a desperate desire to escape.

And by the end, the supposedly talented, “special” Wheelers – the good-looking married couple of Sam Mendes's new film Revolutionary Road – hate each other.

So there’s no suspense or build-up to this tale – it’s just an agonising, banal story of people giving up on love and ambition. It’s predictable and clichéd: the wife in a pinny; the nosey neighbour; long hours in the office; the young, naïve secretary desperate for a moneyed man. April and Frank Wheeler have been married twelve years – the same period of time since the then ultra-youthful protagonists Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio were declaring hyperbolically their love for each on the bow of the Titanic. Coincidental? I think not. Corny? Just a bit.

Mendes wants to show the emptiness of the American Dream. So he attacks the 1950s and simply reinforces the prevailing view of this decade: women just washed the pots and everyone conformed to the dream of a big house with a little white fence and perfectly cut hedges.

Yes, Mendes is brilliant at bringing to life the period, capturing the world that author Richard Yates described in the novel he wrote in 1961. The dress, the cars, the accents, the music, the phrases, the gardens, the bars they visit – everything is perfect. But, unfortunately, it’s just all very stereotypical. Everyone smokes. In every scene. Please: we get it. They smoked a lot back then.

The director and his screenwriter Justin Haythe have focussed too much on the typical characteristics and behaviour of the 1950s. Despite doing it well, it prevents the film reaching its potential. The audience are left with one-dimensional caricatures, characters they cannot relate to or sympathise with.

You get the impression that Mendes wants us to pity April: she used to be young and radical - now she’s entrapped as a classic Stepford wife. When she devises her plan to go to Paris, her last hope of escaping a life of conformity, she falls pregnant and Frank has the chance for a promotion. Her dreams have been crushed, again. But Winslet plays April as cold, devoid of emotion, not very talkative; you can see how she is trying to show that being a loyal housewife has sapped April’s energy, but she just comes across as unlikeable and extremely ungrateful for the privileged life she has. She rarely interacts with her children, which would have showed a loving, caring side. When she decides to have an abortion at the end, it is a surprise when she cries when calling her children when they are at school to tell them she loves them. Oh, did she have children? By then, we've totally forgotten.

This film had the potential to be one of those blockbusters that defines a generation. Overworked, indebted to their eyeballs, the recession making them the number one target for unemployment, twenty- and thirty-somethings are frustrated with their lack of both time and capital to pursue their dreams and get on in life. According to one survey, a startling 60% of the workforce has drifted from its earlier employment aspirations. Half feel their job is a means to an end. Revolutionary Road, where the Wheelers are forced to settle for mediocrity when they initially dreamed of specialness, could have reflected the frustrations of the current iPOD generation.

But it fails. Boyish De Caprio is unbelievable as a thirty-something on the way up the career ladder – he looks and acts younger, adolescent even. And, ironically, most young adults would feel depressed not at how representative the Wheelers life is of theirs, but how unrepresentative it is. Thanks to a housing boom over the past decade, most young people today could only dream of the massive house the Wheelers have. And as for being happily married with kids, young adults would love the time, the employment stability and the income to start a family.

The Wheelers are unlikeable, ungrateful characters. Rather than empathising with their gloom, we find ourselves disliking their whingeing and arrogance. Revolutionary Road could have been so much more.