APRIL 11, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 10

When I was a kid, I knew Tom Hanks from such roles as Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, where he played an ultimately good guy faced with some kind of adversity. I had never seen him with flaws, at least flaws that didn't make him pathetic or disadvantaged, or give him some kind of charm as in Forrest Gump. The way I thought of him, as a child, was as an actor who only played serious roles, Oscar roles, and always the protagonist. I didn't know anything about his real start, his early career, as Kip Wilson in "Bosom Buddies". I didn't know he got famous by sharing the screen with a partner named Hooch. I didn't know that the Tom Hanks I knew was an expansion, a growth, from the Tom Hanks the rest of the world knew, and that playing the roles I was familiar with was a giant leap for him in everybody else's eyes. So when I heard he was playing a darker role, I was excited, while the rest of the world seemed to chuckle.

To see a dark, deadly Tom Hanks was part of the appeal for me to see the film. Director Sam Mendes, known for American Beauty, was another. By the end of the film, however, I felt that although Mendes had delivered the material with a dark punch, Tom Hanks had never become the bad guy he had been advertised as; this sums up the film for me, that although we sit at one of Lake Michigan's sunless forested beaches, we never really tread its murky waters. Hanks' character, Michael Sullivan, is an assassin for the Irish Chicago mob during the height of the Great Depression. However, the evil really ends there, as his job is explained away as a sort of debt to John Rooney, the Irish mob boss who took Sullivan in as a young orphan. Rooney is played deftly by a silver-haired Paul Newman, who smiles unctuously and gleams like steel; Newman shows no fear of evil. When we first really encounter him through the eyes of our story teller, Michael Sullivan Jr., we know what he knows, which is to proceed with caution.

But Sullivan Sr. seems to take no share of this evil, though his son also fears him (with a boyish fascination). Hanks shows us no pleasure in Sullivan Sr.'s job. He's more a good guy forever looking to get out of a bad rut by doing what he is told. In fact, soon enough in the film, he and Michael Jr. end up working against the very organization that Michael Sr. served for his life. This is also well-justified; it turns out that Rooney's hotheaded son Connor, played by Daniel Craig, takes a hit out on the Sullivan family out of jealousy; Rooney seems to favors Michael Sr. over his own son. The Sullivan wife and youngest son are killed, and so Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. go on a vengeful spree of bank heists in order to get the attention of Al Capone.

Little do they know that Capone, upon hearing the news, dispatches an assassin of his own, the ever off-putting Harlen Maguire, played by Jude Law.

With this advent, the film really starts to resemble its graphic novel origins. Harlen Maguire isn't so much a character as an archetype. He has long nails, is obsessed with his own victims, speaks oddly softly, and moves with supernatural assurance. He's Nosferatu, but with a camera, photographing his kills. He becomes a larger-than-life force chasing the father son team, and this is the biggest tension set up in the film.

In many ways, to a degree of success, the visual style of this film mirrors a graphic novel style. The visual look, though dark, is rich and high in contrast. It feels like a gangster movie, hopeless and hard, but sexy, like a page straight out of The Godfather, or at least a deep drink of Coppola's Cabernet. The tension pins us down, holding us as if we were Harlen Maguire's next victim. Its brooding contemplative tone gives the film a sense of richness that matches the visual style. Mendes' aesthetic here is similar to his cinematic debut American Beauty, which has the genius of making us feel as though we've just had a brush with understanding humanity. Road to Perdition, however, doesn't bring the same complexity, giving us a technically brilliant, well acted, well captured, well put together film, but one whose emotional tone isn't well founded, undercutting these other elements.

As much as the film is a chase film, and as much as it’s a revenge film, the movie is a coming of age story. This could actually be called the main focus of the film. And this focus conflicts with much of the events of the film. It's as if we're watching a person's strong realization, but that of a young boy, who realizes that his father is human, not to be feared or idealized, but to be respected. So, in this regard, we, the audience, don't come to realize much at all. At the time of viewing this journey feels real, but it conflicts so strongly with the dark action and slick feel of the rest of the film that we feel the faint sensation that something is amiss. Ignoring this sensation is fine, and it makes for an enjoyable movie-going experience, and we feel changed for the better.

But for as deep as this movie feels, it has very little intellectual backup. In the end it is a good-versus-evil story; this can be shown in the final scene, when the father and son have escaped to Perdition, Michigan, after exacting their revenge on the evil Connor with Capone's permission. We encounter the creepy Maguire one final time, who has been waiting in Perdition the whole time, and wounds Michael Sr. fatally. He is setting up his camera to document his kill when Michael Jr. pulls a gun on him. Before Jr. has to make his decision (as Maguire is classically attempting to sway him to give up his gun), Sr. shoots Maguire, thereby aborting any real lasting internal agony that Michael Jr. would have to suffer, and redeeming himself in his son's eyes. For all the depth the movie feigns to offer, it simultaneously offers us all an easy exit from having to contemplate the difficulties of gangsterism, of revenge, of father /son relationships, of anything, and simultaneously from having to find a real lasting place for this movie in ourselves.

I've been a part of the Midwest my whole life; I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, I went to school here, and all my friends are here. I think it's fair to say I have a certain authority on the Midwest, if I have authority on anything. And I don't know if I've seen Perdition's characters here. I know Capone, and I know Chicago gangs from a historical standpoint, and even the sinister men doing legitimate business (meat-packing comes to mind), so I'm aware of the crookedness that has always been a part of Chicago's history. Still, this story seems like an "angels versus demons" story, which is fine, but in this it loses its sense of the Midwest. The struggles of the Midwest are simple. I feel like we're too tired to fight these big battles. Not tired from work, but tired from staring out at the endless expanse of sky over the endless flat ground, and tired from the schizophrenic weather and the wind. Michael Sullivan Sr. is tired, but he's tired from dealing with a sickness, a sickness in his work, a sickness that I've never quite sensed here.