"Road to Perdition" is paved with good intentions. Its ambition is gigantic, its production craft immaculate, a couple of its performances Oscar-worthy. But like so many crusades, it takes a wrong turn – to Chicago, as a matter of fact! – and in the end frustrates more than satisfies.
In its central performance, Tom Hanks, normally America's favorite Mr. Nice Guy, nudges toward the dark side, but not terribly far. He's a gangster, a killer, an enforcer – but still a nice guy. That's a problem with the film, for this most engaging actor never seems quite comfortable with the demands of the role. He's almost too muted.
Paul Newman and Tom Hanks star in "Road to Perdition."
(DreamWorks SKG, 20th Century Fox)
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Pudged up so that his face manifests potatoey comfort in a story set in the scrawny, nutritionless Depression era, Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, right-hand man of avuncular old John Rooney (Paul Newman, brilliant as an Irish pixie), who is the mob ruler of a nameless Illinois town: Kankakee, Rock Island, Waukegan? In some respects, Michael resembles Robert Duvall's Tom Hagen in the "Godfather" saga, a foundling who's been taken in by a crime family; now he labors long and hard for it. But unlike Tom Hagen, he keeps a Thompson submachine gun in the garage, for those late-night business emergencies.
Still, Sullivan loves his own little family of four and is so committed to normality that he shields them from the true nature of his work. With his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and two sons, he lives the life he never had as an orphan: the big house, warm and comfy against the bleak Midwestern winter and the spare scenes of Depression anomie that form the backdrop of the film. Michael belongs; he loves and is loved; he has a place in an otherwise cruel world, and if once in a while he has to unleash the Thompson's fury on Rooney's enemies to pay for it, he's at home with that. It's not as if he had a choice.
But in every Eden, there's a snake. Or in every "Othello," there's an Iago (the movie begs to be compared with biblical and classic sources). In Whatever-City-It-Is, Ill., it's Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig), the boss's ambitious, violent and dishonest son. Connor – Craig is dynamic in the role – resents Michael's closeness to his dad, and his own smallness in the organization, and thus plots against both Michael and Dad. The question is: Which of his two boys, the real son or the better, more loyal, honorary son, will Dad choose to love? In other words, what carries more weight in an uncertain world, blood or loyalty?
That's a big question, a classic question, and that "Road to Perdition" asks it speaks loudly of its ambition. The movie is one of those intellectual gangster pix, like the "Godfather" movies or Stephen Frears's "The Hit," that use the pulp story form to make more universal inquiries. And the responses, from Michael's point of view, are tragic.
By the halfway point, he's fleeing for his life with his eldest son, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), leaving behind him a rubbed-out younger son and wife, and everybody in the small city and the big city is gunning for him.
Alas, at this point the screenplay by David Self, from a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, hits the big detour and never quite recovers, leaching the movie of the goodwill and the thunderous momentum it had built up. If you thought, as I did, that it was going toward a state of war between Michael and the Rooneys in which, at great cost, vengeance is slaked and justice achieved, you're only about a third right; he fights that war, but by proxy, in another town, and against other enemies.
A big mistake, I think. We'd invested totally in that city, that place, that dilemma and most important, those characters. The demonic Connor and his leprechaun of a dad all but vanish from the film, the former a particular loss since his anger was the driving force of the narrative.
Instead, we discover other dilemmas. In Chicago, Michael appeals for shelter to the Capone organization, represented by Stanley Tucci as a dapper Frank Nitti. Because of strategic alliances, Capone, through Nitti, says no. Thus Michael wages a surrogate war to acquire leverage over Capone. At the same time, the Capone people hire a disagreeable assassin to track Michael down – one Maguire, in bowler hat, behind teeth that look like rotted corn and fingers that haven't seen the inside of a washbasin in years. It will surprise you to learn that the handsome Jude Law lurks behind those teeth and fingers, and it will surprise you even more to note how weirdly this character develops: He's a sort of combination Weegee and Murder Inc. mechanic – a photographer who likes to shoot first what he then photographs. (Like the Capone mob couldn't do better than this?)
Very odd that Maguire gets so much screen time, so little dialogue and so much less character evolution. It's hard to care about him when the more interesting drama languishes down- or upstate. And at the same time, Michael has begun a campaign of robbing mob-affiliated banks of their dirty money, effectively holding the cash hostage until he can convince the Capone people to help him in his crusade against the Rooneys. But again, this is largely uninvolving; he's doing things to people we don't know for reasons we can't figure out. And the following basic question is never answered: How does he know which banks to hit?
Perhaps as devastating to the film is the dreary relationship between Sullivans pere et fils. As I've said, Hanks has been better; I hope Tyler Hoechlin has too. This central dynamic just doesn't work; you never enter into it, and it seems numb and dead, while by contrast the pain and love between Rooney and his son is brilliantly evoked.
Cliches arrive in swarms: People find each other with astonishing ease (several times), kindly farmers take in wounded gangsters without a question or a line of dialogue, and a wounded gangster who has murdered a cop and a colleague and is last seen collapsed with half his face blown away after a bloody hotel room shootout somehow escapes to reappear at a key moment.
More damaging still, the end of the movie gives the weird impression of having been filmed through the wrong end of the telescope. It seems small, muted, played out in the most anti-dramatic method available to its talented young director, Sam Mendes, who really hit the big moments out of the park in "American Beauty."
All in all, "Road to Perdition" is more in love with strangeness than excellence.
ROAD TO PERDITION (R, 125 minutes) – Contains scenes of extreme, though stylized, violence. At area theaters.
