Perdition a la Duncan Shepherd

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The Fighting Irish

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Every inch of the screen looks fussed over.
Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published July 18, 2002
Road to Perdition
The major obstacle to enjoyment of Road to Perdition is American Beauty. Not so much the film itself as its outsized reputation. And not so much the difficulty of putting it out of your mind as the difficulty of the director putting it out of his.
The director, should you need to be told, is Sam Mendes, a British theatrical director who (as they say) burst upon the movie scene three years ago with that trite, glib, sitcommy satire of middle-class America. If it had been widely and properly seen as trite, glib, and sitcommy, there would not now be any problem. (Other than to put it out of your mind, where it belongs, and to assess his sophomore effort on its merits.) Because it was seen instead as trenchant, brilliant, Oscar-worthy, etc., the problem becomes What to Do for an Encore. His problem, not yours, but he makes it yours.
The encore cannot just be a satisfactory reworking of an old gangster-film formula; it will have to be, on top of that, a "meditation" on family and community, on fathers and sons (the line of dialogue that amounts almost to the central thesis: "Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers"), on loyalty and conscience, on fate and free will. And it will have to behave as if all this is something new, something extra, not something innate and implicit, in the formula.
The sense of raising the bar, in the fashionable phrase, seems quite ostentatious at the outset, with its unmistakable evocation of The Godfather. These are Irish gangsters instead of Italian, and they are gathered for a wake instead of a wedding; but the sanctity of the family and the strict demarcation between home life and professional life are very much the same: the pistol that Pa unstraps and puts down on the bed before supper is not meant for the eyes of his eldest (named, in a further echo of the Corleone clan, Michael), for whom the father has higher hopes.
And the arty photography of Conrad Hall (no less arty than that of Gordon Willis for The Godfather, though the painterly influence in this case is New Master rather than Old: Edward Hopper rather than Rembrandt) serves as a constant reminder of the director's self-imposed burden. Every inch of the screen, every second of the running time, looks fussed over: the graininess and grittiness of the image, almost as if viewed through a microscope; the blanched, faded, aged color; the narrow range of focus (see, for the most groan-producing example, the stock slow-motion shot of the protagonist and his son on the sidewalks of Chicago, only the two of them in sharp outline amid an undulating sea of mush); the tidy, flattened, fastidiously balanced compositions.
So much painstakingness will naturally have its rewards: the morbid detail of the dripping ice in the open casket at the wake; the tweedy tactility of the men's suits; the wealth of documentation of Midwest houses and small towns of a bygone era (the Prohibition era); and the thrilling moment when a masked assassin, seeing only his own reflection in the window of the front door as he makes his exit, unwittingly reveals his identity to a witness right outside the door, but hidden behind the reflection in the dark glass.
The film never loses its air of grandiosity, of outgrowing its trimly tailored britches, of throwing several hats at once into the Oscar race: cinematography, costume design, set decoration, leading actor (Tom Hanks, Mr. Dependable), supporting actor (Paul Newman, Mr. Venerable), just about every category but leading and supporting actress (no legitimate contenders: this is a man's world, a man's movie). Yet it does find its stride, right around half an hour into it, as a ritualistic genre piece, a twice-told tale of underworld revenge -- you hit me, I hit you back, and back, and back -- set in motion when an inquisitive twelve-year-old, his imagination stoked by Lone Ranger dime novels, stows away in the rear seat of his father's car, to find out what the old man gets up to on those mysterious nocturnal errands.
The boy's rightful feelings of guilt over the ensuing events, to say nothing of the father's rightful feelings of wrath towards him, receive short shrift in the aftermath, to clear the way for a warming relationship between the two (master and apprentice, criminal and accomplice), and even some deft touches of comedy, once they light out together on the lam: there's actually a destination, we're asked to believe, by the name of Perdition, a bucolic lakeside locale whose settlers must have lacked a dictionary. Tyler Hoechlin, the unknown actor in the role of the son, bears a striking facial resemblance to American Beauty's Wes Bentley -- the burning eyes, the scowling brows -- but more vulnerable in proportion to his fewer years. And Hanks, as the taciturn father, is still Hanks beneath the flinty exterior: a mob enforcer with a gooey-nougat center.
The film -- or rather, Mendes -- unfailingly rises to the occasion in the scenes of violence, adopting a variety of approaches and vantage points to keep the scenes fresh, resisting the urge to charge into the thick of it. And although the anti-Godfather finale (at the end of a blessedly non-epic running time) may be a bit soft-hearted, even arguably self-contradictory, it doesn't really ruin anything. And by "self-contradictory," I mean something much more than the curious choice to have the twelve-year-old character narrate future developments in his twelve-year-old voice; but I ought not go further into it. I don't want to ruin anything, either.
There is, in the last analysis, nothing much to ruin. This is not, for all its striving, a "great" gangster film. It is at least, however, a genuine one, a generic one. It reaches nowhere near the level of, to keep the comparison among Irish gangsters of an earlier generation, Miller's Crossing. It tops out nearer the level of Billy Bathgate (Jewish gangsters but an Irish protagonist). Its ordinariness, odd to say, is its primary source of strength. The striving for greatness weighs it down as much as pushes it upwards.

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Parts Connexion

Topic - Perdition a la Duncan Shepherd - clarkjohnsen 12:15:33 07/18/02 (2)

Sounds like a Hanks film - mvwine 09:57:13 07/19/02 (1)

"Concise" is good. nt - clarkjohnsen 07:24:05 07/20/02 (0)

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