Revolutionary Road is a good movie- in fact, it could arguably be called a great one- but it’s a hard one to love. In a decently faithful adaptation of Richard Yates’ superb 1962 novel of the same name, the actors all execute admirably, the camera is wielded deftly, and every piece of the film comes together just as it should—but something about it left me decidedly cold as I left the theater.

Frank and April Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, reunited for the first time since Titanic) are a young couple living in suburbia and suffocating under the same-sameness of their everyday nine-to-five lives. Frank works at a cubicle job in the same big corporation that his father toiled away in for decades, nameless and faceless. April, after a failed attempt at acting, fulfils her 1950s housewife duties—cooking, cleaning, taking care of their two kids—all while on the verge of going mad from feeling that they’re somehow above the overwhelming ordinary all around them.

Desperate to “save” their life from succumbing to such banality, April comes up with a plan: they’ll sell the house and move to Paris, where April will work and support the family as Frank “finds himself.” In the following few months, their relationship is invigorated with this promise of hope and the chance to make a life that will reflect their ambition for something more, something deeper. But of course the plan falls through; Frank gets offered a promotion that comes with the money he thinks will finally get him the life he deserves, and April discoverers she is pregnant—threatening to bury her in the life which she so hates. The rest of the film plays out into a dramatic conclusion as Frank and April give in to their self-loathing, attacking each other like caged animals until their perfect suburban exterior can no longer sustain the decaying marriage beneath and falls in on itself.

The acting all around is excellent; DiCaprio and Winslet put on a goddamn clinic. Winslet especially is heartbreaking as she captures so much agony and longing in April’s face and is consistently relatable—who among us hasn’t felt the excruciating desire for our life to mean more? Michael Shannon, in just his two scenes, manages to act circles around everyone else (as is becoming a habit for him in virtually every film he appears in). His character has a Joker-esque intensity, with manic eyes and a body that seems coiled for an explosion at any moment, and next to the Wheelers’ bullshit his brutal honesty is refreshing. Sam Mendes (American Beauty), Winslet’s real life husband, directs the film to perfection (though shooting the love scenes must’ve been a tad awkward).

And that’s the problem with Revolutionary Road. It’s too perfect. Many of DiCaprio and Winslet’s scenes felt almost stage-like. I was watching two actors hit their marks just right and infuse their lines with every bit of actin’ they had. Mendes’s direction was so clean and tight it didn’t seem to let any of the messiness and chaos from Yates’ novel come through. Thomas Newman’s fantastic score parallels the movie itself in a sense—breathtakingly haunting and effectively sparse, but ultimately really fucking depressing.