Road to Perdition
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More movie reviewsThe worst thing about Road to Perdition is that, with its very title, it gives away much of the plot. Sure, there’s fictional Midwestern town named Perdition that becomes a sort of ironic Promised Land for the Michael Sullivan and his son, but there’s little doubt that the perdition at the end of Sullivan’s road is literal, not geographical.
More than anything else, Road to Perdition is a movie about blood, both in the sense as blood as family bond and blood as violence. “Pray for Michael Sullivan,” commands the movie’s posters. Yet prayers for Sullivan must by offered to the God of his world, an angry, Old Testament God who demands blood atonement, an unrelentingly bleak world of Depression-era killers and bootleggers under the thumb of Chicago gangster Al Capone.
Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, an enforcer for John Rooney (Paul Newman), head of the local Irish mob in a city on the Illinois/Iowa border (Rooney, in turn, operates with the permission of the Capone family). As such, at the beginning of the film, Sullivan is living a seemingly idyllic home life, despite the perversity of work life.
Everything changes when Sullivan’s older son, Michael Jr., curious about what exactly it is that his dad really does at work, hides in the back of his father’s car when Sullivan and Rooney’s son Connor go out on a job. He ends up seeing a man killed and is then discovered by Sullivan and Connor. Things began to unravel from there, and the Sullivan family pays the price.
At the heart of the film’s conflict are the complexities of loyalties among families and the pseudo-family of the mob hierarchy. Rooney raised Sullivan like his own son, and Sullivan has remained loyal to Rooney his entire adult life. Yet when circumstances pit Sullivan against Rooney’s blood, Connor, Sullivan is abandoned, despite the fact the Sullivan has clearly been a more dedicated employee and more loyal son than has Connor. Forced to flee from the reach of Rooney’s gang, Sullivan travels with Michael Jr. to Chicago to seek an audience with Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti in order to obtain Capone’s permission to avenge himself upon the Rooney family. Failing this, Sullivan hatches a scheme to force Capone to grant his permission. Meanwhile, a hit man (played by a sublimely creepy Jude Law) is dispatched by Rooney and Nitti to kill Sullivan.
Road to Perdition has plenty of Aristotelian pity and fear. The only thing that keeps it from being hopelessly grim is the voiceover narration by Michael Jr., which offers some hope that maybe he can transcend his blood and the bloodshed. Obviously, if he’s narrating he survived to tell the tale, which is no small feet in and of itself . . . but you can’t help wondering if there isn’t some other John Rooney down the block or the next town over.
This is a very good film with an outstanding cast, incredible-looking cinematography by Conrad Hall that should win all kinds of awards, and solid direction by Sam Mendes (American Beauty). The writing is a little more pedestrian, unfortunately. The plotting tends toward the mechanical and the characters are a kind of flat, which keeps this from being a really great film, but shouldn’t keep you from going to see it.
Matt Parks (August 24, 2002)
