The ingredients are all there — a highly acclaimed novel, an Oscar-winning director, mounting awards buzz and a couple of actors whose last screen pairing resulted in one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, Titanic.

So why is Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and an Oscar-tipped Kate Winslet, such a disappointing downer of a film? It's not for want of commitment on the part of the actors. Winslet and DiCaprio hurl themselves into the punishing roles of April and Frank Wheeler with the fervour of penitents, flagellating themselves for all to see.

The Wheelers find themselves kicking against the cosy Fifties suburban existence that claimed them while they weren't looking, reigniting briefly the adventurous spirit that attracted them to each other during their courtship. Their dream of escape to bohemian Paris is short-lived, however. April finds herself pregnant with a third child and Frank is tempted up the treacherous ladder of career advancement. The relationship descends into infidelity, excoriating attacks on each other and desperate railing against the prison of middle-class suburbia.

The problem is that the elegant savagery of Richard Yates's dialogue, which reads with a gratifyingly poetic violence, doesn't sit quite as easily in the mouths of actors. Suddenly, the bitter repartee feels overwritten and the performances mannered and theatrical. The effect is distancing — the Wheelers feel less like credible humans with legitimate problems and increasingly like the characters in a third-rate play. Fans of the book are not necessarily going to be fans of this adaptation.

The Wheelers are not the easiest couple to empathise with. April is frosty, and Winslet's normally approachable beauty has never appeared so aloof. Frank is petty and selfish, the kind of man who has no problem finding his wife culpable because he has chosen to have an affair.

But it is partly the structure of the film that makes them particularly difficult to warm to. The director, Sam Mendes, starts the film with the fallout from April's unsuccessful debut in amateur dramatics. The scene descends into a thermonuclear row, full of verbal attacks intended to inflict the kind of wounds that don't heal.

It's not until a good 20 minutes into the film that we get to see April and Frank, in flashback, in love. But we can't really mourn this lost closeness between them because we have already seen them as a couple at war.

Mendes makes several poor directorial decisions, not least flooding the film with emotive music designed to wash the audience along with the flow. But his worst moment comes just after the tragic climax.

DiCaprio's slow-motion sprint of anguish through the suburbs, howling at the picket fences, is an embarrassingly corny piece of direction.

Revolutionary Road opens nationwide on January 30

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010