Starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, and Jennifer Connelly. Rated 18A.

The hell that is modern suburbia gets another compelling tour-bus visit, this time courtesy of director Todd Field, who also got personal with his debut feature, In the Bedroom. Here working from a novel by Tom Perrotta, he ventures into the bedrooms of two couples skidding down the road to nowhere.

When we meet Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet), she’s taking her young daughter, “this unknowable little person”, to a playground where local moms gather to gossip. Sharp-witted and sarcastic—she has a degree in English literature—she doesn’t want to lower herself to their mundane standards. Still, when she sees how they swoon over the arrival of a handsome dad they call the “prom king” (Patrick Wilson), she decides to join the competition.

Soon, she not only knows his name, which is Brad, she’s shouting it in every room of her graceful 1920s home while her kids are asleep. Madame Bovary ain’t got nothing on her.

The literary references fly in this superbly acted drama, which owes more to John Updike and John Cheever than more classical works. There’s even an omniscient narrator commenting wryly on the action, although this device is employed only at the start and finish, as if it’s your own inner voice speaking as you polish off a fine text.

Brad is married to a hard-working—and, as he says, “knockout” (Jennifer Connelly)—documentary filmmaker. He’s supposed to be studying for his bar exam, which he’s already failed on several occasions. But when not boffing Sarah, he’s watching skateboarders and wishing he was still 16 or playing football with off-duty cops—one of whom (Noah Emmerich) is obsessed with the recent return to the neighbourhood of a sex offender. This character is played, memorably, by diminutive Jackie Earle Haley (Breaking Away and The Bad News Bears). He is, in a way, part of another couple, given the Norman Bates–style obsession he has with his mother (Phyllis Somerville), who is his only shelter from the world’s cruelty, and perhaps his own, as well.

The film has a couple of stumbling points that are hard to overlook. The largest comes with the repeated assertion that Winslet’s character is a homely mouse, and the second biggest is the relegation of Sarah’s husband (Gregg Edelman) to the sidelines. It’s hard to root for her when we’re not quite sure where she’s coming from, in the bedroom and elsewhere.