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Film Description
Tom Hanks stars in this gangster drama set in the American Midwest during the 1930s. Twelve-year-old Michael Sullivan Jr is curious about what his father (Hanks) does for a living, and one night decides to hide in his car as he goes off to work. It soon transpires that the elder Sullivan is a hitman for the mob, and when young Michael witnesses a killing carried out by the gangster boss's son Connor (Daniel Craig), it starts off a chain of events which will mark Michael's life forever. Co-starring Paul Newman and Jude Law and directed by Sam Mendes, this is a technically accomplished period piece that boasts some of the loudest gunshots ever heard, not to mention an unusual amount of ice around its heart .
Although the title might suggest a Crosby/Hope project unrealised on account of its dark and hellish vision, Road To Perdition is, in fact, Sam Mendes’s follow-up to A... more >
Although the title might suggest a Crosby/Hope project unrealised on account of its dark and hellish vision, Road To Perdition is, in fact, Sam Mendes’s follow-up to American Beauty, and the route Chicago hitman Tom Hanks must travel with his young son (Tyler Hoechlin) after the rest of his family is wiped out by rival killer Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig), son of Mob boss Paul Newman.
One or two scenes - after the bleak opening hour and before the bleak last half-hour - tend towards cutesy, Saturday-morning-matinee material, threatening to reduce the plotting to mush, rather than pulp. But oddly, the film chooses never to go entirely down that road. The coldness many perceived in American Beauty is here again, sublimated into the sheet rain and snow, and the ice packed round a dead man’s coffin to better preserve the body. Even at the end of the film, there’s still a distance between father and son, the hitman watching his child through a window which correlates to the doorway through which the child watches his father preparing for work at the start of the film. This lack of reconciliation feels more convincing expressed here than when attempted in something like About A Boy, another strangely cold piece in which a supposedly heartless bastard is redeemed by a pre-teen child. (Some of Hoechlin’s facial expressions - his looks of mute, defiant incomprehension - recall those of the young actor Nicholas Hoult in the Hugh Grant film.)
Muteness is Road To Perdition’s dominant characteristic. The kid spies on his father at work, daring not to make a noise; there’s a silent shoot-out towards the film’s end. Much of the film in between is emotionally mute, revolving around the comparative parenting skills of the Hanks and Newman characters, and coming up with the unusual, mumbled conclusion that it’s better to have a distant father than an abusive father. (This might be the same conclusion teenage lovers Jane and Ricky reach, while on the run at the end of American Beauty.) It’s no wonder some critics - and some viewers - felt the film didn’t speak to them on its cinema release last year.
Unlike the definitive American Beauty, Road To Perdition provokes doubts and uncertainties rather than assured proclamations. About the only thing I *am* sure of is that I can safely say the film is technically outstanding, with a dozen or more superlative directorial decisions. I’m pretty certain you won’t have seen a film where the bullets have sounded so loud, and - in a film of muteness - you leave with these, rather than cheap platitudes, ringing in your ears. Yes, Road To Perdition *is* a cold film, but the ice around its heart preserves more of real interest than a great many softer films of redemption. < less
