So this is a movie about Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio getting married and moving to the 1950s suburbs and having a horrid marriage. Which sounds cliched, right, and maybe it is a little bit, but it didn’t feel cliched to me.

It’s not really about the suburbs, anyway. It’s about reconciling the dreams of youth with the life you grow into; about figuring out what it really is you want out of life; about the possibility of change in the face of societal convention; and about the circumscribed options available to women then. It’s more than a little brutal, and more than a little bleak, but (like most movies I like) it also possesses a touch of grace – even as it shows us characters being flawed and sort of awful, it makes us forgive them for being merely human.

Also, it tells us what we’ve known since Titanic: Kate’s way too good for Leo.