Perdition fails to live up to past

When your first feature film wins numerous Academy Awards,

including best picture, actor and director, what do you do next?

This was the enviable dilemma director Sam Mendes must have found

himself in after the success of “American Beauty.” He could either

safely repeat himself with similar material or stretch himself with

something more challenging. With “The Road to Perdition,” Mendes has

admirably chose the latter.

Unfortunately, “The Road to Perdition” is a flawed piece of

filmmaking that often buckles under the weight of its own importance.

Yet, Mendes’ deft hand and immense talent as a visual storyteller are

on display in nearly every frame of the film.

Tom Hanks has also decided to challenge his good guy persona by

playing a 1930s hit man named Michael Sullivan, who literally kills

for the love of the man, John Rooney (Paul Newman), who took him in

as an orphan child. Rooney loves Michael like a son, and clearly

favors him over his own child, Connor, a reckless, pathetic, jumpy

man who has the temerity to ignore the codes of honor and chains of

command that exist in a corrupt organization such as Rooney’s, who

works for Frank Nitti and Al Capone.

This is dark material, but Mendes’ assured touch provides many

indelible moments: at a wake, Rooney and Michael play a melancholy

duet on the piano, it is clear they are completely in sync in their

affection for each other, and you feel Connor’s pain as he watches,

humiliated, an ironic smile glued on his face.

Mendes does not glorify his violence; the act of murder is staged

in dark, murky streets and corners that has a mounting sense of

tragic inevitability that recalls Coppola’s “Godfather” films but

also manages to seem stylistically fresh and potent.

“The Road to Perdition’s” central weakness is its ambitious, but

ultimately predictable script. I was always two steps ahead of the

story and had figured out the ending by the halfway point.

Overall, the story structure is weak. The first act is promising,

but the second act deteriorates into your basic cat and mouse chase.

Mendes needed a better script. This one relies on tired plot

conventions when more character exploration would’ve done the trick.

This shouldn’t take away from the depth characterizing in many of the

individual scenes, and there are some touching moments.

The biggest crime committed by “The Road to Perdition” is it’s

underuse of the magnetic and formidable Paul Newman, who has the most

complex role of all. Newman is a major player in the first act, but

only has a handful of scenes through the rest of the movie, tossing

us tidbits of greatness but leaves us hungry for more.

His John Rooney is a man alternately torn between his intense love

for his surrogate son and his guilt and pity over his biological son,

and his clear-minded, unblinking and coldly calculating ability to

make business decisions that will end in bloodshed. Rooney does not

delude himself, he knows there will be a price, as he tells Michael

there is but one certainty: “None of us will see heaven.”

“The Road to Perdition” fails on as many levels as it succeeds,

but it does so gloriously, with Mendes choosing to take another shot

at greatness rather than fall back on the laurels of past success.

For that, I applaud him.

* ALLEN MacDONALD, 29, is currently working toward his master’s

degree in screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los

Angeles.