Salocin

Road to Perdition

There is a moment in American Beauty when a plastic bag is filmed moving as if possessed with its own anima. It is a moment self consciously highlighting the beauty of the world around us if you only care to look. It works because it is grounded within a movie about people.

The Road to Perdition plays like an entire film of ‘bag moments’. Every shot is self consciously beautiful and calls attention to itself. Sadly, there is no human interest to ground it.

It is hard to know where to lay the blame. The performances are, with the sole exception of Tom Hanks, excellent. The soundtrack is, of itself, beautiful. The direction is frequently artistic and aesthetic. The writing is minimal but sharp (with one salient exception).

However, for all the cool brilliance and control of the direction, Mendes completely fails to find any heart in his story. It is notable that every important emotional moment on the path of Hanks’ anaemic hitman occurs off screen. From the start the audience is distanced from the characters and that sense of distance is only enhanced by an obtrusive use of the score which deliberately drags you away from the specific events in favour of a more general sense of ‘watching a serious movie’.

Hanks is poorly cast as the hitman. He runs an emotional gamut from A almost all the way to B seemingly unsure why the filmmakers cast someone with his nice guy persona as a cold hearted killer. In fact, he resembles nothing so much as Stan Laurel pretending to be a gangster. Fortunately Paul Newman is as reliable as ever, Jude Law contributes yet another excellent performance (as in AI using physical traits to delineate his character) and Stanley Tucci provides a well observed cameo as Frank Nitty, Capone’s enforcer.

The film is not without merits. The hotel shoot out between Hanks and Law is superbly constructed and filmed and there are some well observed moments between characters. However, the final moments fatally undercut those strengths. The closing voice over is truly awful, simply repeating that which has already been shown for those who were not paying enough attention to grasp the point before continuing in a morass of pointless mawkishness.

Mendes has some way to go if he is going to prove himself a great director for Road to Perdition has few of the strengths seen in American Beauty and many self indulgent weaknesses.