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EARLY in ”Road to Perdition,” a period gangster film that achieves the grandeur of a classic Hollywood western, John Rooney (Paul Newman), the crusty old Irish mob boss in a town somewhere outside Chicago, growls a lament that echoes through the movie like a subterranean rumble: ”Sons are put on the earth to trouble their fathers.”
Rooney is decrying the trigger-happy behavior of his corrupt, hot-headed son, Connor (Daniel Craig), who in a fit of paranoid rage impulsively murdered one of Rooney’s loyal lieutenants. The ear into which Rooney pours his frustration belongs to Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), his personal hit man, who witnessed the killing. An orphan whom Rooney brought up as a surrogate son and who has married and fathered two boys, Sullivan is in some ways more beloved to Rooney than his own flesh and blood. He is certainly more trustworthy.
But as the film shows, Rooney’s bitter observation about fathers and sons also works in reverse: fathers are eternal mysteries put on the earth to trouble their sons as well as teach them. The story is narrated by the older of Sullivan’s two boys, 12-year-old Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), who in a prologue establishes the movie’s tone and setting (most of the events take place over six weeks in the winter of 1931) and invites us to decide, once his tale has been told, whether his father was ”a decent man” or ”no good at all.”
”Road to Perdition,” which opens today nationwide, is the second feature film directed by Sam Mendes, the British theatrical maestro who landed at the top of Hollywood’s A-list with his cinematic debut, ”American Beauty.” The new movie re-teams him with Conrad L. Hall, the brilliant cinematographer responsible for that film’s surreal classicist shimmer. With ”Road to Perdition” they have created a truly majestic visual tone poem, one that is so much more stylized than its forerunner that it inspires a continuing and deeply satisfying awareness of the best movies as monumental ”picture shows.”
Because Sullivan is played by Mr. Hanks, an actor who invariably exudes conscientiousness and decency, his son’s question lends the fable a profound moral ambiguity. ”Road to Perdition” ponders some of the same questions as ”The Sopranos,” a comparably great work of popular art, whose protagonist is also a gangster and a devoted family man. But far from a self-pitying boor lumbering around a suburban basement in his undershirt, Mr. Hanks’s antihero is a stern, taciturn killer who projects a tortured nobility. Acutely aware of his sins, Sullivan is determined that his son, who takes after him temperamentally, not follow in his murderous footsteps. Yet when driven to the brink, Sullivan gives his son a gun with instructions to use it, if necessary, and enlists him to drive his getaway car.
In surveying the world through Michael Jr.’s eyes, the movie captures, like no film I’ve seen, the fear-tinged awe with which young boys regard their fathers and the degree to which that awe continues to reverberate into adult life. Viewed through his son’s eyes, Sullivan, whose face is half-shadowed much of the time by the brim of his fedora, is a largely silent deity, the benign but fearsome source of all knowledge and wisdom. An unsmiling Mr. Hanks does a powerful job of conveying the conflicting emotions roiling beneath Sullivan’s grimly purposeful exterior as he tries to save his son and himself from mob execution. It’s all done with facial muscles.
Yet Sullivan is also beholden to his own surrogate father, who has nurtured and protected him since childhood. Mr. Newman’s Rooney, with his ferocious hawklike glare, sepulchral rasp and thunderous temper, has the ultimate power to bestow praise and shame, to bless and to curse. The role, for which the 77-year-old actor adopts a softened Irish brogue, is one of Mr. Newman’s most farsighted, anguished performances.
What triggers the movie’s tragic chain of events is Michael Jr.’s worshipful curiosity about his father. Desperate to see what his dad actually does for a living, he hides in the back of the car that Sullivan drives to the fatal meeting at which Connor goes haywire. After the boy is caught spying, Connor, who hates and envies Sullivan, decides without consulting Rooney that the boy can’t be trusted to keep silent and must die. He steals into Sullivan’s house and shoots his wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and his other son, Peter (Liam Aiken), mistaking Peter for Michael Jr., who returns on his bicycle as the murders are taking place.
Arriving home, Sullivan finds his surviving son sitting alone in the dark, and as the camera waits downstairs, Sullivan climbs to the second floor and discovers the bodies. As his world shatters, all we hear is a far-off strangled cry of grief and horror. Minutes later he is frantically packing Michael Jr. into a car, and the two become fugitives, making one deadly stop before heading toward Chicago where Sullivan hopes to work for Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci), Al Capone’s right-hand man. For the rest of the movie, Sullivan plots his revenge on Connor, who remains secreted in a Chicago hotel room, protected by Rooney. Sullivan’s plan involves a Robin Hood-style scheme of robbing banks but stealing only mob money.
The film, adapted from a comic-book novel by Max Allan Collins with illustrations by Richard Piers Rayner, portrays the conflicts as a sort of contemporary Bible story with associations to Abraham and Isaac, and Cain and Abel. The very word perdition, a fancy term for hell, is meant to weigh heavily, and it does.
True to the austere moral code of classic westerns, the film believes in heaven and hell and in the possibility of redemption. In that spirit its characters retain the somewhat remote, mythic aura of figures in a western, and the movie’s stately tone and vision of gunmen striding to their fates through an empty Depression-era landscape seems intentionally to recall ”High Noon,” ”Shane” and ”Unforgiven.” When the characters speak in David Self’s screenplay, their pronouncements often have the gravity of epigraphs carved into stone.
A scary wild card slithering and hissing like a coiled snake through the second half of the film is Maguire (Jude Law), a ghoulish hit man and photojournalist with a fanatical devotion to taking pictures of dead bodies. When he opens fire, his cold saucer-eyed leer and bottled-up volatility explode into frenzied seizures that suggest a demonically dancing puppet. And just when you have almost forgotten the character, he reappears like an avenging fury.
The look of the film maintains a scrupulous balance between the pop illustration of a graphic novel (Michael Jr. himself is shown reading one, ”The Lone Ranger”) and Depression-era paintings, especially the bare, desolate canvases of Edward Hopper. The camera moves with serene, stealthy deliberation (nothing is rushed or jagged), while the lighting sustains a wintry atmosphere of funereal gloom. Mr. Hall embraces shadow as hungrily as Gordon Willis in the ”Godfather” movies, but where the ruddy palette of ”The Godfather” suggested a hidden, sensual, blood-spattered twilight, ”Road to Perdition” comes in shades of gray fading to black.
Those shades are matched by Thomas Newman’s symphonic score, which infuses a sweeping Coplandesque evocation of the American flatlands with Irish folk motifs.
In the flashiest of many visually indelible moments, a cluster of gangsters silhouetted in a heavy rain are systemically mowed down on a Chicago street in a volley of machine-gun flashes that seem to erupt out of nowhere from an unseen assassin. But no shots or voices are heard. The eerie silence is filled by the solemn swell of Mr. Newman’s score. It is one of many scenes of violence in which the camera maintains a discreet aesthetic distance from the carnage.
Although ”Road to Perdition” is not without gore, it chooses its bloodier moments with exquisite care. The aftermath of another cold-blooded murder is seen only for an instant in the swing of a mirrored bathroom door. Another is shown as a reflection on a window overlooking an idyllic beach on which a boy frisks with a dog. Here the overlapping images evoke more than any words the characters’ tragic apprehension of having to choose between two simultaneous, colliding worlds. One is a heaven on earth, the other hell.
”Road to Perdition” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for a lot of violence, including some gory moments.
ROAD TO PERDITION
Directed by Sam Mendes; written by David Self, based on the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins; produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Dean Zanuck and Mr. Mendes; director of photography, Conrad L. Hall; edited by Jill Bilcock; music by Thomas Newman; production designer, Dennis Gassner; released by DreamWorks Pictures. Running time: 119 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH:
Jennifer Jason Leigh (Annie Sullivan), Tom Hanks (Michael Sullivan), Paul Newman (John Rooney), Ciarán Hinds (Finn McGovern), Dylan Baker (Alexander Rance), Stanley Tucci (Frank Nitti), Tyler Hoechlin (Michael Sullivan Jr.), Jude Law (Maguire), Daniel Craig (Connor Rooney), Liam Aiken (Peter Sullivan).
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