|
 As a measure of how dismal the year in films has been, we had to wait until July for the first great movie of the year.
Road To Perdition” is an elegant, tough gangster film brightened by solid performances from every member of the cast. As he showed in the over-rated “American Beauty”, director Sam Mendes wins half his battles by casting fine actors and letting them do their thing. Tom Hanks, who has drawn from the sensitive man well several times too often, pulls off one of the best performances in his career, managing to appear both surly and soulful. He is as believable as a father as he is as a gangster, and that’s no mean feat. Paul Newman doesn’t offer much more than his screen presence, but even that, as usual, is more than enough. Tyler Hoechlin, as Michael Jr., does exactly what a young actor in his shoes should do: he gets the hell out of the way. Best of the bunch is Jude Law, taking the Steve Buscemi role, chilling as the hit man Maguire who’s sent to rub out Sullivan. Part psychopath, part fastidious craftsman, Law’s Maguire seems to imply that the worst thing the cops could do would be to put his Mafia employers out of business. At least this crackpot serial killer was only following orders to put down other gangsters. Imagine him freelancing.
Mendes demonstrates an exceptionally striking narrative savvy. He has a masterful, painterly style, often punctuating scenes with surprising aural elements. Michael’s eavesdropping on his father’s bloody handiwork is a masterpiece, as we get only a worm’s eye view as the bullets fly. The texture of the scene is really achieved through sound— the shell casings hitting the floor ring like Christmas chimes. Later, during the first stage of Mike’s revenge, the gunfight is completely muted in favor of the tragic, florid music that emphasizes the drama rather than the carnage. One-upping himself, Mendes then shatters that reverie of piano with the death rattle of Mike’s machine gun, a masterstroke that drives home the fact that the other deaths mattered little; the only death Mike “hears” is the one that matters most. Twice Mendes uses background noises to create rhythms to a scene that suggest heart-beats, such as the swing music in the nightclub, when Mike is betrayed, and again, to even greater effect, with the waves in the final showdown. With this film Mendes has firmly established himself as one of our greatest stylists, and his use of incidental sounds to punch up his already arresting visuals is without peer.
If there is a drawback to “Road To Perdition”, it’s that each of the major performances is built on minimalism, requiring that the empty spaces be filled with the romantic piano score that tries to broaden the story’s scope. There are some tough, brutal scenes in the movie, yet for the most part, the music seems borrowed from a more elegaic, father-and-son relationship movie. The mood is somewhat fitting, since Michael is telling the story in a tranquil flashback, but the arrangements are often too precious for the story in the foreground. Indeed, at times, the technique smacks of collecting interest on unearned capital. The emotional dimension of the story is there, and it is affecting, but often real interaction between the characters, especially the two Mikes, is travestied as sparse dialogue nailed to the velvety, evocative score. This was one of the major problems with “American Beauty” as well. If Mendes wanted to take an approach opposite from the Coen Brothers, whose gangsters are usually mile-a-minute wise guys, he should have taken more care to flesh out the dialogue. The reliance on music to tell the story puts “Road To Perdition” into an occasionally distracting, opera-like realm of filmmaking.
For the most part, though, Mendes handles his story beautifully. Despite the fact that the protean Jennifer Jason Leigh goes underused— in fact, really not used at all— its minimalism is ultimately an asset. There’s enough gangster material to place it among the ranks of the best, most artfully realized films of that genre, but the violence is never over the top. Murders seem like murders (with the exception of the final tommy-gun slaughter) and the hoods appear as they so often claim to be in these affairs, but seldom act like: hard-bitten businessmen. This may be one of the most original gangster films ever made, in that it takes a more realistic middle ground between the family politics of “The Godfather” and the stoic power-plays in “Miller’s Crossing”. At various points in the film, each of the key characters has a line which states something to this effect: “Nothing personal. Business is business.” But each of the key players eventually gets them confused. Rooney cannot turn his back on his son, even though he has every rational reason to do so; Frank Nitti claims that the Chicago mafia is protecting Sullivan out of love and respect, but it’s really a shrewd financial calculation; and, most importantly, Mike cannot lay aside his revenge in the name of good business even when he’s presented a compelling case to go home to Rooney.
This moral confusion is enough to have elevated “Road To Pedition” beyond a mere entertainment. These dark days, any sort of ambiguity in a film makes it stand out only too brightly from the rest of the dim bulbs in release, the all-too-tidy “Minority Report” being only one recent offender. But Mendes makes a larger point, one which guarantees “Road To Perdition” a place among the handful of genuinely original gangster films. Crime films nearly always revolve in some way around a thug’s relationship to his family, raising questions such as what family loyalty means in the underworld, who a man’s real family is, and how to reconcile his family life with his chosen profession. This is where the tragedy enters, as the sordid activities of criminals mix with the deep and primal nobility of family loyalty. Mendes strides confidently into a place of understanding that only Coppola before him seems to have reached, and then only with a flamboyant limp: that the truth about real gangsters has no real claim to tragedy because it is without redemption, that the glamour that we associate with criminals is nothing but an empty promise. Killers kill until they are killed. That is the only order in “Road To Perdition”. In such a world, the only possibility to retain purity, which Mike realizes as he passes into quite another underworld, is never to pull the trigger in the first place.
| |
