Our Father

Road to Perdition

When Tom Hanks’ above-the-title credit appeared onscreen at the beginning of Road to Perdition, a woman in the audience I saw the movie with murmured, “Best actor in the world.” Although Hanks probably wouldn’t make a professional critic’s top 10, a poll of average moviegoers might well agree. He has achieved a high level of public affection with roles that combine old-school stoicism—the kind of strong, silent manliness that evokes nostalgia for the “greatest generation”—and ’90s-style sensitivity. Hanks can talk about his feelings without being feminized.

So what’s this best-of-both-worlds actor doing in the role of a mob hit man who instigates an apocalyptic bloodbath when his wife and youngest son are murdered? Anyone familiar with the source material—a pulpy, tragic graphic novel written by Max Allan Collins and drawn with great splashes of inky blood by Richard Piers Rayner—would have a hard time seeing Hanks as Michael Sullivan, the “Angel of Death.” In the book, Sullivan is all stoicism, all men-at-work and zero sensitivity. He and his elder son, Michael Jr., are forced to leave their Illinois town when his employer John Rooney, the head of the Irish mob (played by Paul Newman in the movie), apparently orders the extermination of his family. The Angel, a man of the gun, decides that the only way to secure his son’s safety is to kill everyone involved in the murders—especially Connor, Rooney’s son, half-crazy and under the protection of his powerful father.

Writer David Self and director Sam Mendes fill out this bleak, spare page-turner with material that makes sense of Hanks’ casting—family, intimacy, a little humor. Most of the added intricacies are improvements on the sketchy graphic novel, which was created primarily to evoke a Depression-era moral universe, and whose sole subtext was a rather blatant religious one centering on Sullivan’s Catholicism and his oft-repeated sobriquet. Self and Mendes contribute a clarification of the mobsters’ motivations, and they add extra layers to the mirrored families: Sullivan, it turns out, was raised by Rooney as a brother to Connor. They also throw in a hired gun (Jude Law) to pursue the Sullivans. If nothing else, the complications keep us from questioning Michael Sullivan’s grim parenting strategy.

The filmmakers’ best idea is to depict the way family and work fail to stay in their neat, allotted places. Sullivan treats his job bumping off Rooney’s enemies as if it were factory labor to be left on the shop floor; but soldiering, as he calls it, involves loyalty, blood, ethnic solidarity. Rooney, his surrogate father, treats Sullivan’s kids like an indulgent grandpa, but when the tommy guns start firing, no code of honor or business can convince the boss to sacrifice his real son, or even to spare Michael Jr. In the filmmakers’ hands, the religious theme also becomes more interesting. A frustrated underling refers to Rooney as “God” early in the film, and the identification of God and father enriches the familiar moral universe of the gangster.

Thematic depth, though interesting, probably isn’t what attracted Mendes and Self to this story. It’s the chance to train cinematographer Conrad Hall’s legendary lens on some purely cinematic compositions, for which Mendes relies heavily on Rayner’s comic panels. The filmmakers succeed for such long stretches—even in the sequences they’ve added or transformed—that the places where the movie goes soft are all the more disappointing. A long sequence in which the fugitives become bank robbers is full of quiet humor involving Michael Jr. learning to drive a car, but it plays as broadly as slapstick. An otherwise brilliant set piece in a rainy street almost disintegrates when Hanks lets his sensitive ’90s guy show through. And any scene involving hugging just falls apart.

Road to Perdition is hard to evaluate because it feels like three-quarters of a movie for its own sake, with the remaining quarter consisting of highlight-reel fodder for a Hanks career retrospective. He’s not necessarily out of place here, but his casting does seem to have shaped the way the story evolved. It’s interesting that Hanks’ most popular film of late was Saving Private Ryan, which he has parlayed into a platform to talk about the moral clarity of World War II. If anything in Perdition gets lost because of Hanks’ presence, it’s the amoral absurdity of a world populated by many fathers but no gods.

—Donna Bowman

Sci-fi blockbusters prove thematically rich

The science fiction genre gives artists the option of making complex social, emotional and political ideas not just understandable, but palatable. Why, for example, tell a dreary story about race relations bound by the facts and sensitivities of stupid old reality, when you could set your story on a distant planet and make it about a conflict between green-skinned and orange-skinned aliens? Or why even be that overt? Deft storytellers can sneak their thoughts into a popular entertainment without even disturbing the surface.