Road to Perdition

JACOBEAN GANSTAS

For those of us who think Sam Mendes didn’t achieve much with the inexplicably overrated American Beauty, his next one, Road to Perdition, will probably be a more engrossing experience. After a slow murky beginning, swathed as it is in veneered imagery, swollen implications and with two superstars—Paul Newman and Tom Hanks—attempting to alter our universal perceptions of them as super good guys, the movie suddenly fires up after Hanks delivers a “letter” to a sleazebag. We know something is going to happen, and we know the sonnavabitch who instigates the action, but we’re still startled by the turn; better yet, we’re relieved something is happening. It isn’t until this point do we start to accept Hanks as a heavy, but we’re also well aware the most popular actor of his time will have a twisted redemption. He doesn’t waste his greatest of gifts from the acting gods—the ability to unleash audience empathy. (Some of us think the thin mustache not a winning touch.) If there’s a major surprise in the picture—and there aren’t many—it’s Newman refusing deliverance, but not before taking Communion! As a corrupt Irish kingpin, Newman says, “Sons are put on earth to trouble their fathers” and some scenes later when he’s pounding away on son Daniel Craig’s recklessness, the movie cements its Jacobean inevitability. Newman’s last major movie role, he gets his in one of Mendes’ most accomplished setpieces: in a night downpour, with only music and muffled sound of rain and Newman’s one line and spurts of machine gun fire heard, it’s noirish bravura as damning horror in quietness. Dark, moldy and very moody, Road to Perdition has been justifiably praised while creating a dilemma for viewers: why do we come out it with less than a grand response? Partly, it’s Jude Law as the photographing assassin who loves his work; he seems to get more repulsive with each succeeding role (the image will change after this movie), and we’re never going to be pleased with anyone who tries to harm Hanks, the protective factor audiences bestow on him. The larger part in holding back our enthusiasm could be in how heavily story-boarded the drama is, its origins coming from the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner as blueprint for 1930s familial gangsterism proportioned as mythology. Everything is prefabbed, all the kinks worked out, nothing is unexpected. The cumulative effect is very much intendedly equal to turning the pages of a well-preserved and annotated picture album, not too far removed from Coppola’s The Godfather, or the body language in Bertolucci’s The Conformist, to be studied and copied. In retrospect, when comparing this to American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, and 1917, even the two Bond flicks Mendes directed, those of us who have held back appreciation need to be more generous. Though Conrad Hall posthumously and deservedly won honors for his cinematography, and Thomas Newman’s score ominous, evocative and strangely yet fittingly euphonious, and Newman and Hanks shifting into actors’ minimalism, they and viewers owe thanks to Mendes for staying faithful to American gansta etchings while regaining his British class, having gone astray in AB and RR. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ciarán Hinds (who looks like the real father to Hanks’ screen son), Stanley Tucci, Dylan Baker and in a small bit Anthony La Paglia.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com