Road to Perdition
With Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Tyler Hoechlin, Daniel Craig, Jude Law, Stanley Tucci, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dylan Baker, and Liam Aiken.
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Most, maybe even all of these attributes can constitute virtues if they’re handled with enough skill. And I won’t deny that they’re handled with a great deal of skill here; Mendes is as resourceful and inventive with these materials as he was with the equally salable goods of American Beauty–which I prefer in some ways, but only because I’m more of a sucker for the equally dubious New Age mysticism and middle-aged angst of that film than I am for redemptive bloodbaths and childish revenge stories, even if they’re also populated by middle-aged characters. I also tend to prefer stories in which women play more than a decorative part, and Road to Perdition has no such role. The built-in corruptions of the two movies are equally apparent–and equally irrelevant to those who opt for entertainment over virtue. So I can recommend them equally. And for those looking for directorial signatures, Mendes has found one: the symmetrically framed portrait of a small family seated at a dinner table.
“There are many stories about Michael Sullivan,” says Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), the 12-year-old narrator, over a shot of a beach and the sound of lapping waves, in an opening so familiar we may feel we already know it by heart. “Some say he was a decent man. Some say he was no good at all.” I say the fact that he’s played by Tom Hanks makes him a decent man even if he sets out to slaughter enough people to fill a city block.
I like Mendes’s talent for invention, even when it calls attention to itself (as in the robbery montage or when he shuts off the sound of gunfire during most of a climactic shootout), and I like his capacity to view American life from an outsider’s perspective. I don’t like his paradoxical capacity to use this outsider’s perspective to validate many of this country’s most complacent notions about itself; his international credentials let him pretend to be critical of American attitudes while swallowing them hook, line, and sinker. This attitude made American Beauty a piece of kiddie porn and an attack on middle-aged women almost as much as it was a serious look at male menopause and middle-age burnout. And it makes Road to Perdition a movie that exploits infantile notions about vengeance, even though it’s careful to tack on a moral disclaimer at the end.
