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Tom Hanks and Sam Mendes lose their way
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
What a load of overboiled cabbage this movie is. Gray and watery in both look and feel, Road to Perdition is a gassy trudge with a faint but unpleasant aftertaste. It is also a sad example of how badly a talented filmmaker can muck up in pursuit of artistic significance.
British director Sam Mendes was on top of the world after debuting with American Beauty in 1999. He won an Oscar for best director, leaping with dazzling ease from the theater (where he was already pegged as one of the top talents of his generation) to the big screen. It would be charitable to him to spend a lot of time agonizing about how he could go so wrong with his next project. But it's really not much of a mystery.
Road to Perdition is a product of an all too common Hollywood affliction: the Big Important Picture syndrome. BIPs are what happen when directors, producers and actors of a certain stature set out to make serious statements about life, death and man's place in the universe. Every once in a while, through some fluke of either imagination or luck, these BIPs turn out to be decent films. More often, they are humorless, didactic tomes, movies you are supposed to applaud for their intent and high-mindedness. And they are almost never any fun at all.
So it is with Road, yet another gangster drama fraught with questions of loyalty, morality and family honor. It's adapted from a graphic novel, but the source material can't be held accountable for Mendes' missteps—few comic books have ever seemed as inert as this film. Nor can you blame cinematographer Conrad Hall, who composes his images with the same heavy baroque touch he brought to American Beauty. Whatever else it is, Road to Perdition is very well appointed.
The Depression-era plot sets up a Shakespearean dilemma. Michael Sullivan (a grim and doughy Tom Hanks) is a faithful husband and father who supports his family by providing muscle for local mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman). Rooney is more than an employer—he was Michael's surrogate father, taking him in as a boy and teaching him the family business. When Michael's 12-year-old son Michael Jr. (newcomer Tyler Hoechlin) stows away in his dad's car one night and witnesses an execution, Rooney's real son Connor (Daniel Craig) decides the boy has to die. The bungling Connor has always been jealous of his father's affection for Michael.
But Connor messes up and kills Michael's wife and younger son instead, leading to a prolonged cat-and-mouse game with the father-and-son Sullivans hitting the road while plotting revenge. Things are further complicated when the Rooneys hire a sociopathic hitman (Jude Law) to kill the two Michaels.
All of this sounds more exciting than it plays. Despite frequent bursts of violence, the film never builds up much tension, either in the action scenes or the characters. One problem is that Mendes is a calculating classicist, and he uses his gore ornamentally. You get the feeling he selected the bathroom tiles and bed sheets because of how well they would offset the brain splatter.
As in American Beauty, which drowned in red rose petals, his symbolism has all the subtlety of a Howitzer. In one early scene, Hanks sits down at the piano next to Newman and plays the high-end accompaniment to Newman's bass part. See, he's Newman's right-hand man! The kicker is that the title, which is pretty overwrought just as a metaphor, turns out to be literal—the climactic scene of the film takes place in a town named Perdition. My 8th-grade English teacher wouldn't have let me get away with that.
The other big problem is Tom Hanks. Right, sure, the role is a bold step away from his upright Mr. America image and all that, but it just doesn't work. What made Hanks a star in the first place was his puppyish energy and barely contained hysteria, the sense that there really was a 12-year-old boy trapped in there trying to get out (that's why Big was his best role). Over the past decade, he has worked hard to establish himself as a "serious" actor, winning Oscars and playing AIDS patients, stoic war heroes and the like. In the process, he has methodically drained away everything that made him a pleasure to watch. What's left is a taciturn bread loaf. In Road to Perdition, Hanks seems afraid to smile, as if the mere hint of humor will remind the audience of Bosom Buddies and Bachelor Party. Michael Sullivan is supposed to come across as emotionally repressed—Hanks walks with his shoulders rigid and his legs too wide, like a kid's idea of a tough guy—but there's no edge to him at all. He disappears inside his trench coat.
The rest of the cast barely registers. Newman doesn't invest more in Rooney than the script calls for, which isn't much. Hoechlin is passable as the wide-eyed urchin, but he never sells his dialogue (you can imagine him rolling his eyes at all the "Gee, Pop" lines). Predictably, it's the Brits who deliver—Law and Craig at least give their characters some malicious bite.
By the time the film winds to its conclusion (which involves, I swear, an orphan boy, a dog, and a kindly childless farm family), Mendes has left almost no Hollywood archetype unfondled. The result does indeed qualify as BIP: Bloated Impotent Puffery.
July 25, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 30
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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