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.
The most highly touted science fiction film of ideas this season has been Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as a cop leading an advanced division of officers who stop crimes before they occur. The Philip K. Dick story, adapted by screenwriter Scott Frank, mainly provides Spielberg with ample chances to indulge the weird, tense set pieces and eccentric characters of noir mysteries, while working in a little satire of our consumer culture. The film also raises some mind-bending questions about the limits of free will, once Cruise’s character gets accused of a “pre-crime,” which he then scrambles to prevent himself from committing.
Even admirers of Minority Report have grumbled that this latter theme gets short shrift as the film’s plot gets ever more twisted, making it all but impossible to sort out what the characters’ plausible courses of actions are. But to dwell on the underrealized themes of determinism is to miss the more Spielbergian ideas at the center of the story. Minority Report is of a piece with A.I. and Jurassic Park, in that it’s about humanity arrogantly trying to impose order on something that has a life of its own—in this case, crime. The film’s third act reflects on a grand scale a statement made by a character early on: When threatened, all living organisms fight to protect themselves. First Cruise’s cop and then his entire organization contradict their core principles to preserve the system itself.
This warning against an overreliance on systems that eliminate the human factor can be interpreted as a direct criticism of contemporary society’s obsession with zero-tolerance policies, mandatory minimum sentences and “three strikes” legislation. More to the point, it’s an incisive comment on the smug, thoughtless nature of mankind, one so sly that many people haven’t even noticed it.
Less thought-provoking but still surprisingly profound is the critically slighted Men in Black II. As with most sequels, the motivation behind Men in Black II seems to be the piles of money that such a presold property can draw, which lends the film a sort of tentativeness, likely born of a mercenary shame on the part of director Barry Sonnenfeld and co-stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. There’s very little in the way of plot to Men in Black II—it’s a standard repetition-and-slight-inversion-of-what-worked-before scenario—and the entire endeavor is short to the point of skimpiness, at just over 80 minutes.
Yet Sonnenfeld and his team of screenwriters (led by Galaxy Quest/Addicted to Love scribe Robert Gordon) have carried over the one element of Men in Black that disappeared amid the first film’s frenetic action: the intense feeling of loneliness and dolefulness that stems from being a covert operative aware of, but unable to share in, the biggest secrets of the universe. Most of the offhand visual gags in Men in Black II contrast the small and the big, and two of the best bits (including the stinger ending) rely on the old philosophical rumination about universes nesting within universes. This breezy summer blockbuster is suffused with a feeling of isolation.
Although Men in Black II is clumsy at times and not as funny as it could be, it has a core charm that makes it very watchable; and that candy center cleverly disguises the bitter flavor of the film’s main ingredient. It’s a rare action movie indeed that insists upon humanity’s deep remove from any really meaningful action. But then, that’s what smart storytelling is all about.
—Noel Murray
