director
Sam Mendes
screenwriter
David Self
based
on the graphic novel by
Max Allan Collins
Richard Piers Rayner
producers
Sam Mendes
Richard D. Zanuck
Dean Zanuck
cinematographer
Conrad L. Hall
music
Thomas Newman
editor
Jill Bilcock
cast
Tom Hanks (Michael Sullivan)
Paul Newman (John Rooney)
Jude Law (Maguire)
Jennifer Jason Leigh (Annie Sullivan)
Stanley Tucci (Frank Nitti)
Daniel Craig (Connor Rooney)
Tyler Hoechlin (Michael Sullivan Jr.)
Liam Aikin (Peter Sullivan)
Ciarán Hinds (Finn McGovern)
Dylan Baker (Alexander Rance)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 119m
u.s.
release: 6/12/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other sam
mendes films
reviewed on this website:
- american
beauty
- jarhead
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Road to Perdition seems to have been positioned as the
anti-Spider-Man
-- the based-on-a-comic-book movie that doesn't feel like a comic
book. The original 1998 graphic novel, written by Max Allan Collins
and drawn by Richard Piers Rayner, read like a breezy, exciting
movie (Loren D. Estleman commented that the book was "the
best movie I've seen in years"). But what works in a comic
book doesn't always work on the screen; just because a comic
book combines words and images doesn't make it tailor-made for
Hollywood. Free advice for future producers who flip through
a comic and see dollar signs: Comics like Ghost
World, which on the face of it did not look like
movie material, often make the best movies (with that in mind,
guys, go forth and option Love and Rockets and do it right).
So we arrive at the movie version,
a case of derivation twice removed -- Collins' book was an acknowledged
tribute to the Japanese comic Lone Wolf and Cub. In
other words, we have a movie based on a comic based on another
comic. It's no wonder, then, that Road to Perdition is
one of the most beautifully crafted films that ever made me come
close to falling asleep. The director, Sam Mendes, is the latest
gifted filmmaker (his debut was American
Beauty) to be a deer caught in the headlights of post-Oscar
expectation. Mendes and screenwriter David Self have taken vital,
pulpy material and made it pictorial and dull. This story badly
needed someone like John Woo, who would've spiced it up and made
the most of its themes of family, honor, duality, betrayal. Instead
it got Mendes, who approaches the story hat in hand, as if it
spoke bottomless truths about the human condition.
We're in Depression-era Illinois,
where the amiable old criminal John Rooney (Paul Newman) reigns
over his corner of the Capone empire. As in so many stories of
this stripe, the old man has a genetic son, Connor (Daniel Craig),
a useless hothead, and a like-a-son-to-me, Michael Sullivan (Tom
Hanks), his main assassin. (In the book, Sullivan's name precedes
him; people fear him wherever he goes, and he's nicknamed the
Angel of Death. The movie hardly addresses that at all, and leaves
out his nickname.) Sullivan has two sons of his own, one of whom,
his namesake Michael (Tyler Hoechlin), sneaks into his dad's
car one night and goes along for the ride to find out what he
does for a living. Michael finds out, all right; he witnesses
a gangland massacre, setting in motion a chain of events that
lead to the death of his mother and little brother. The two Michaels
hit the road, stopping every so often so that the grim-faced
Sullivan (never a bubbly personality to begin with) can pursue
vengeance.
It might be possible to go
along with Road to Perdition as an iconic mood piece.
Conrad L. Hall's burnished, dark, rain-drenched photography is
immaculate, and the film moves with a heavy elegance. But eventually
the heaviness sinks the story. There are really no people
in Road to Perdition -- only archetypes of good or evil
-- and therefore no performances possible. Hanks, for instance,
seems so submerged in tough-guy laconic mannerism he looks drugged
half the time. Even the usually vibrant Jude Law, cast (and uglified)
as a despicable shutterbug/hit-man, is given nothing to play
except the surface that Mendes so attentively photographs. Jennifer
Jason Leigh is around briefly (and is wasted) as Sullivan's doomed
wife, but other than her, no women are allowed to taint the elaborate
masculine anguish. The movie is full of musing about fathers
and sons: fathers who are bad men but good fathers, sons who
are disappointments and sons who shouldn't want to be like their
fathers -- this all may mean a lot to men afflicted with macho
sentimentality, but female moviegoers may yawn through a lot
of Road to Perdition.
Eventually the movie folds
up into complete pictorialism. Two key murders -- the ones we
want to see, the ones this entire creaking revenge melodrama
is pointing toward -- are secondary to Mendes' fancy staging;
one of them is the first such retribution I can recall that registers
visually as an afterthought, as a mirror swings toward the camera
and shows us the aftermath. This is self-conscious filmmaking
and has nothing to do with the basic needs of the story. Mendes
doesn't even include Collins' juicy exchange between Sullivan
and the murderer of his wife: Connor snarls "I'll see you
in hell," and Sullivan says, "Hell will be heaven if
I can spend eternity making you pay for what you did to her."
There's pulpy poetry in that; for all its glory of image, this
Road to Perdition lacks not only poetry but the unpretentious
conviction of pulp.
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