Continued ...
July 9, 2002

ROAD REDUX:  I saw Road to Perdition again on Monday night.  This time the post-screening meal found me surrounded by people who hated the film.  Hated!  But I still stand by my original review.  This is a good yarn, well told.

I do, however, have some more concerns.   (And once again, I will avoid spoilers.)  This time through, the music drove me nuts.  Thomas Newman does his second score for Sam Mendes and it really hit me this time how much it sounded like the score for American Beauty, with a different hook.  And as I was listening to that, I was noticing how much like American Beauty this film was made to be by Sam Mendes… to its detriment. 

American Beauty was also a good story, well told.  But it was held up as much more than that.  There are lots of arguments to be found about that film.  Some people absolutely despise it.  For others, it is their favorite film.  For me, it is a movie of diminishing returns.  And after a second viewing, so is Road to Perdition. 

I guess it doesn’t help that I read the graphic novel in the last week before seeing the film again.  As usual, experiencing a film in a different medium opens up more holes.  This was a mixed bag in this case.  The film creates the Jude Law character from the ether and I consider him one of the true highlights of the movie, both as a performance and as a character.  On the other hand, the movie eliminates two key elements of the graphic
novel; religious subtext and intense violence.  They have
softened the blow of the story. 

In the graphic novel, Michael O’Sullivan – changed to Sullivan in the movie – is the Angel of Death.  People literally call him “the angel.”  And indeed, in the graphic novel, he is a nearly supernatural force.  Time after time in the movie, Tom Hanks’ Sullivan slips away, while in the book, he goes for the guns.  And while the graphic
novel doesn’t offer what I would consider the deepest depths of exploration on the religious level, it sets up a fascinating, powerful idea. 

The movie, like American Beauty, avoids any real violence and revels in a theatrical world.  Once again, scenes are shot through proscenium arch after proscenium arch, a choice that made a lot more sense in American Beauty and as a signature for Mendes, needs to be rethought.  Conrad Hall delivers spectacular imagery
again, but the movie doesn’t deliver the grittiness of the times or the story.  

Sam Mendes takes a story about good and evil and makes it into a story about fathers and sons.  And while that element is definitely in the book, that’s not what Max Allan Collins wrote.  The problem for me is that even in the transition, I would have been willing to buy Mendes’ story… if it were told more passionately.  They included
“The Hanks Scene,” which I’m now beginning to recognize as the two-person dialogue scene where Hanks and someone else share a powerful, intimate conversation in which Hanks obliquely tells you what he is really feeling.  It was added to Cast Away with a re-shoot, I believe… the scene after the lobster buffet in which Hanks explains
all in that great, quiet speech.  And it turns up in Road to Perdition in a scene in a sequence at a farm house that was created for the film. 

In fact, all the parental subtext of Road to Perdition was created for the movie.  The competition between Mike Sullivan and Connor Rooney – changed from Looney in the book – for the parental love of Old Man Rooney is new, creating all kinds of motivations that the graphic novel was better off without.  They lost the edginess of Mike Sullivan, for whom murder was a way of life and survival trumped
any of the niceties of trying to help his son evolve to be a better man than he… his son’s survival was all he cared about.

I think that Road to Perdition would have been a real Oscar movie and might have been one of the greatest movies of all time had the creative team shown the gustiness to do it all.  There were a lot of clever
additions and details.  But the story needs the rawness of the book.  That’s what’s missing.  Tom Hanks making the choice to kill a dozen men instead of taking the back stairs to avoid them… Tom Hanks setting a mob gambling ship on fire, recklessly endangering the lives of hundreds of people in order to make a point… Tom Hanks brutally
taunting Old Man Rooney with the knowledge that his son, Conner, will die violently and letting him live to experience the pain that Sullivan suffers… none of that is in the film.

I don’t want to spoil the movie experience, so I won’t be any more detailed at this point about other American Beauty similarities.  But let’s just say that Sam Mendes seems to have refashioned a great potboiler of a story with heavy religious subtext into what is essentially the same movie he’s already made.  All I can say is, I’d like to meet
this guy’s father.

READER OF THE DAY:  King Cur writes:  “Dave:  At what hours will you be sitting shiva for your computer?  My condolences.

E ME:  Is that a slur against jews?  What are you saying?  I’m offended!!!

Just kidding.  Actually, when I wrote about the Ovitz thing last week, I mentioned jews and I didn’t capitalize.  My well-intentioned webmistress “corrected” my mistake and added the caps that live in the stylebook.  I should have told her.  From now on, I’d like every ethnicity to stay away from caps, because the stylebook doesn’t want them all capped.  Black, white, jewish, chrisitian, gay, straight… whatever. 

Steiger and Frankenheimer are dead.  They deserve proper tributes.  They will come later this week. 

I am finding that my feelings about upcoming summer movies is changing… my appetite is changing and I’m truly looking forward to the popcorn drama of Blue Crush and the wham-bam of XXX.  How about you?