Road to Perdition

Synopsis: Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) works for John Rooney (Paul Newman) as a hired gun. Ostensibly a decent-living family man, when his own son, Mike (Tyler Hoechlin), accidentally learns what his father does, and Rooney's own son, Connor, decides to erase the Sullivan family, Michael Snr has to take desperate measures to save his son's life.

A film directed by Academy Award winning director Sam Mendes, produced by Dreamworks and starring Tom Hanks can comfortably be expected to deliver quality mainstream cinematic entertainment. Road to Perdition does not disappoint. If anything, it over-delivers, nearly stifling beneath its luxurious, finely wrought production values (it cost US$80 million to make, US$1 million for every year of Paul Newman's life).

It is about gangsters, but it's not really a gangster film. Just as Tom Hanks is a suburban wage-earner who just happens to kill people for a living , so this is a wallow in the values of family, loyalty and obedience that just happens to have Depression-era bootlegging as its context. The essence of it is the father-son relationship and the time-honoured trajectory of estrangement and rapprochement, but Death of a Salesman it's not. It's more sentiment than drama. There is a scene involving Hanks and his screen son, that attempts to establish some meaningful dialogue between them , but it's somewhat forced and no real dynamic ever develops (there are occasional films when it does work, but in general it's not a good idea to give such a prominent role to a child in an adult film ,witness Spielberg's misfire with AI-Artificial Intelligence, which btw also starred Jude Law). Rather it's Newman and Hanks as the son-he-wished-he'd-had that do a better job of bringing that relationship to life, even if they remain embedded in the narrative.

Or embedded as if in stone. It is as if each drawn frame of the graphic novel on which the film was based has been blown up to the size of a mural but the characters remain trapped with that frame even if it is now of grandiose proportions. This stylistic approach will not please all - the film sets out to be larger-than-life, mythic and monumental. I wouldn't say it achieves that, as its all too familiar, but I liked it's stylisation and the 120mins passed quite well (tho' I had trouble with the ending, and as for the word play on the film's title, well that was too much). Some, on the other hand, will find it ponderously predictable.

Of the cast Hanks is Hanks. Jennifer Jason Leigh gets killed off without more than a couple of scenes to her credit, Newman is excellent as the world-weary Irish don and Jude Law's schematic portrayal of his eccentric character reminded me of Joe Pesci's very-different-but-related portrayal of Weegee in the 1992 film The Public Eye. So, although this does not set the world on fire, sentimentalists and melancholics should find it quite enjoyable.

 

 

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