In his new film director Sam Mendes continues to explore his fascination for American suburban culture with a portrait of a young couple, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, living in 1950s Connecticut. Their marriage has grown stale and their search for something new proves more problematic than they imagined. It’s a theme that also attracted Leonard Bernstein in his 1954 opera Trouble in Tahiti. The film is based on a book by Richard Yates that Kurt Vonnegut called “The Great Gatsby of my time”. For anyone coming to this without seeing the film, it will be hard to see how the revolutionary bit applies. There’s little clue to be gleaned from Thomas Newman’s laidback score. The main theme on piano, which plays a prominent role throughout, seems to convey the couples’ plight by being appropriately doleful in mood. Newman paints the suburban milieu of groomed lawns and whitewash fencing, familiar from earlier films on this subject, in artifical synthetic colours, with diffuse textures like fluttering flutes, a vibraphone and at one point the sound of a muted accordion in the cue “The Golden Couple”. Three pop songs of the period, including a track by the Ink Spots, fit snugly into this ambience. The cue “Bright Young Man” suggests in its spiky theme the brittle character of the husband and as with last month’s Defiance soundtrack, a longer cue, “April”, gives an overall impression of what turns out be a really rather vacuous score. But perhaps that’s the point.