At first glance, you'd probably be hard pressed to find two movies more different from each other than the ones produced so far by Sam Mendes. The director's first film, you may recall, was the Oscar-gobbling American Beauty, a candy-colored cartoon about modern suburban angst and beautiful losers going through all manner of ch-ch-changes.
Mendes' sophomore effort, Road to Perdition, feels like something else entirely. A classically constructed period piece about feuding gangsters in the early 1930s, Perdition is as dark and densely textured as American Beauty was bright and quirky. Even the movies' titles seem to give away their fundamental differences. From one film to the next, Mendes has gone from offering us bittersweet beauty to pointing down a road to a world whose dictionary definition includes vistas of loss, destruction and eternal damnation.
Once you get beyond that first glance, though, Mendes' two seemingly different films have a lot more in common than anyone might have thought. So much in common, in fact, that, even with just two movies under his belt, it's already tempting to think of Mendes as a full-fledged auteur in the grand old tradition — that is, as an artist whose distinct cinematic vision, voice and agenda are going to come through regardless of what sort of movie he's making. There are only a few of these guys floating around America these days — Paul Thomas Anderson and maybe David Fincher or Todd Solondz come to mind — and we can use every last one of them we can get.
Road to Perdition is an almost unremittingly gloomy but occasionally magnificent gangland epic about a six-week road trip taken by a fugitive mobster and his young son. Like American Beauty, Mendes' new film is very much a generational thang, clearly consumed with the eternal struggle between fathers and sons. Beyond that, Mendes has made another movie about finding comfort and even redemption in the strangest places, and also about how coming of age is not a process that's necessarily specific to the young. In both American Beauty and Road to Perdition, the real struggle with growing up seems to apply most of all to the grown-ups.
Both of Mendes' movies are morality tales of sorts, stories of characters confronted by looming personal dilemmas generated by having to deal, mostly badly, with compromise. In Road to Perdition, as close as we get to a hero is the character played by Tom Hanks — a former war hero who now makes his living doing dirty jobs for the local crime boss. Described at the outset by his own son as a question mark between "a decent man or a complete no-good," Hanks' Michael Sullivan is a character whose feelings and real nature are largely veiled even to those closest to him, possibly even to himself. An uncharacteristically ambiguous role for Hanks, Sullivan is a paid killer who doesn't like what he does, but does it anyway (sort of like a gun-toting version of Kevin Spacey's character at the beginning of American Beauty). It's understood that Sullivan does what he does to provide for his family, but beyond that he does it out of a sense of oddly placed love for his employer, the first in the movie's long list of father figures.
Road to Perdition keeps us guessing for a good, long while as it gets up to speed during its opening scenes. We're presented with a series of sequences involving the gatherings of families, both real and ersatz, and eventually a big, beautifully choreographed wake where it's virtually impossible to tell who's actually related to whom. What's crystal clear, though, is that blood relationships hardly matter here, since everyone in this sprawling Irish community is considered family in one way or another. For better and for worse.
The head of this extended clan is Sullivan's employer, a benevolent dictator by the name of John Rooney. Played with maximum charm and effortless authority by Paul Newman, we're as seduced as we are eventually creeped-out by Rooney, a God-like character who bestows blessings with one hand while doling out death with the other. Inspiring a calculated mix of fear and love among his flock, Newman's character is a bit like an Old Testament tough-love Jehovah, but then again, so are most of the movie's real and surrogate daddies.
Newman has one of his best entrances in recent memory here, walking into a crowded room with arms outstretched, beaming, "Who's got a hug for a lonely old man?" — and causing all of us in the audience to want to leap into the picture and comply. Everyone in the room instantly swarms around him and smothers him with love (or something like it), including Sullivan's kids, giving us the impression that this man might just be their grandfather. A few scenes later, one of Sullivan's children has seen something that he shouldn't have, and Rooney is given the order to hunt down the boy and his father, making sure, in the most permanent sort of way, that they don't ever, ever talk.
What the boy has seen is doubly scarring: a brutal, bloody killing in which his own father is a reluctant but active participant. It's one of the rudest awakenings possible for a young kid (especially for someone who hasn't previously even been sure of what his father does for a living) and the beginning of a coming-of-age process that takes up the rest of the movie. Targeted by the all-seeing Rooney and his loose cannon, trigger-happy son (a mad dog killer who's always grinning because "it's all so fucking hysterical"), Michael Sullivan Sr. and Jr. go on the lam, seeking revenge and survival, and finding (this is a Hollywood movie, after all) redemption.
Road to Perdition is too good a movie to be typecast as "depressing," but there's no denying it's a heavy and frequently grim piece of filmmaking. There's an uncommon emotional intensity at work during most of the movie that's really only relieved by a somewhat lighthearted stretch at roughly the film's midpoint, when Sullivan and son devise a plan that necessitates them pulling off a series of rather unusual bank robberies. But even this relatively upbeat stretch eventually segues into more intensity, beginning with the film's most brilliantly staged and executed moment: an incredibly suspenseful sequence involving two adjoining hotel rooms, a lurking killer, a man ordering room service, a get-away car, and a shoot-out waiting to happen. One of the most exciting and imaginative five minutes of screen time since the chase scene in David Fincher's Seven, what we have here is a sequence worthy of Hitchcock himself — a fact of which Mendes himself seems keenly aware. The scene plays out almost like an homage to the master of suspense, in fact, with even the soundtrack music suddenly becoming noticeably Hermann-esque.
Stand-out sequences aside, Mendes' entire film is constructed along the lines of a piece of a music, with a symmetry, grace and power more commonly associated with a symphony than with cinema. Road to Perdition opens with tentative, brooding phrases that introduce us to its concerns, before settling in to its darkly majestic main themes. The film stirs us with both power and intimacy, briefly opens itself up with a light little scherzo, then becomes taut and nervous again before finally resolving itself in its most personal and emotionally direct passages. It's dense stuff, but very rewarding.
Along the way we get haunting, strangely poetic moments like a soundless shootout in the rain, and a sprinkling of leitmotifs like the recurring characters popping up throughout the film. Best of all is the stooped, reptilian sad sack played by Jude Law, again demonstrating his amazing versatility as a sadistic killer who combines aspects of the crime photographer Weegee with the conflicted voyeur at the center of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
Conrad Hall, the cinematographer from American Beauty, supplies images of dark, wintry splendor, and the whole thing adds up to a project that, while not as immediately hooky as Mendes debut, may just be an even better film. The trailer currently making the rounds on TV gives away far too much of the story for its own good (or ours), so do yourself a favor, avoid the tease, and head straight toward Perdition.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2002.
