Road to Perdition (2002) Review
8/10
An enforcer’s son hides in a car and watches a killing. The family is destroyed for it within a day, and father and son take to the road together while the father works out how to end things.
The son narrates as an adult. That tells you in the first minute that he survives and that this memory comes from somebody who loved a man he probably shouldn’t have.
This one unsettles me in a way few gangster pictures do. It’s a film about a boy trying to decide whether his father is a monster, and it’s quiet enough that the question stays with you after the credits. I think it’s the better film of Mendes’s first two by a wide margin, and the proof that a beautiful movie doesn’t have to be a hollow one.
It came directly after American Beauty, which had won Sam Mendes an Academy Award for his first film, and it’s a considerably better piece of work that almost nobody rates as highly.
The 8 is for a film that’s beautiful without being empty. That’s rarer than it should be.
Every frame is composed and every composition is doing something. It loses a point for a middle stretch where the plot mechanics take over and for Jude Law’s character, who’s a good idea that never belongs in this film’s tone.
What the Boy Is Learning
The film is a road movie whose destination is a decision about what kind of man the son will become, and the father is the only teacher available.
So every practical skill passed between them is loaded.
Michael Jr learns to drive because he’s going to be the getaway driver. He learns to watch the door. He learns which banks his father will rob and which he won’t, and why the distinction matters. I find those driving lessons harder to watch than any of the shootings, because the kid is so pleased to be good at it.
The father teaches competence because competence is all he has to give, and each lesson brings the boy closer to the life he’s trying to prevent him entering. There’s no version of this journey where the son arrives at the end unchanged.
The scene where Michael Jr asks whether his father loved his brother more, and the answer, is the film’s whole argument in two lines. The father says he loved them both, which is a lie he doesn’t expect to be believed, and then corrects himself.
The final line of narration answers the question the film has been asking. Asked whether his father was a good man or whether there was nothing in him at all, the son says only that he was his father.
That’s the most honest ending available, and I think it’s the best closing line in any gangster film I know. The son doesn’t forgive his father and doesn’t condemn him. He states the fact of the relationship, and that’s what a memory of a parent really consists of.
A relationship becomes visible through transferred skill far more clearly than through stated feeling, and the transfer is among the most underused devices available. What one character teaches another, and what the teaching costs, will tell a reader everything about the bond without a word of reflection.
The technique is to find the practical thing that gets handed over and then let it be useful. Michael Jr becomes a competent getaway driver, and the competence is real, so the reader understands both the intimacy of being taught and the horror of what his father is equipping him for. A skill that doesn’t work teaches nothing.
The test is to look at your central relationship and ask what passes between the two people other than dialogue. Money, a habit, a piece of knowledge, a way of holding a tool. If nothing does, the relationship exists only in what they say to each other, and readers don’t fully believe relationships built on speech.
Conrad Hall’s Photography
Rain, glass, lamplight, snow, and almost nothing warm. Hall shot the picture in cool light and reflective surfaces throughout, and won the Academy Award posthumously for it. He died in January 2003, less than six months after release.
The rain sequence outside the restaurant is the one everybody remembers. Newman’s character stands in a downpour, the gunfire is silent under the score, and you watch a man die without hearing any of it. Hall lit it from behind so the rain reads as light instead of water.
That silent rain sequence is the reason the film holds an 8 for me in spite of its sagging middle. Taking the gunfire away and leaving only the score makes Newman’s death feel like something the boy is remembering, and I can’t think of a better choice Mendes makes anywhere in the picture.
There’s also a sequence in a Chicago hotel corridor lit only by a doorway, and a diner interior where the window reflections carry more information than the actors, and a farmhouse in Michigan photographed like a Hopper.
It matters because the beauty is deliberately at odds with the events, and the mismatch is the point. This life looks like that from outside, and the boy is watching it from outside for most of the film. Hall had shot Butch Cassidy, In Cold Blood and American Beauty. He was in his mid-seventies when he made this and had reportedly been told the diagnosis during production.
Mendes has said Hall’s approach was to remove light instead of add it, and to find the one source a scene could plausibly have and work only from that.
Newman and Hanks Against Type
Hanks plays a killer with no charm deployed at any point. That’s the opposite of everything an audience brings to him, and he doesn’t soften it once. He’s quiet, courteous and entirely without warmth toward anybody except his younger son. That casting is doing structural work. The audience keeps waiting for the likeable Tom Hanks to appear and he never does. That means the son’s question about whether there was anything in him at all remains open. I think it’s the bravest work Hanks has done. Every time I expect the familiar warmth to leak through, he shuts it off, and the film is colder and better for it. Paul Newman, in his last live-action role, plays a man who loves both his surrogate son and his real son and knows he’ll have to choose between them. He was seventy-seven.
The scene at the piano is two men who understand each other completely, playing together, already grieving a relationship neither has ended yet. It’s the best thing in the film and neither of them says anything of substance. Newman’s final scene, in the rain, is a man who has known the outcome for some time and has no complaint about it. He was nominated and lost, and it’s the last performance most people saw him give. Daniel Craig plays the real son, badly served by the script, and Stanley Tucci is in it for four minutes as a Capone lieutenant and is perfect.
The Graphic Novel Underneath
It’s adapted from a comic by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, itself heavily influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub, the Japanese series about a disgraced executioner traveling with his infant son.
That lineage explains the structure. Lone Wolf and Cub is episodic and stylized, with a father whose competence is total and a child who observes, and the film keeps the shape while removing most of the violence.
The comic is considerably bloodier and the film’s restraint is a deliberate change. Mendes cuts away from almost every killing, and the two he shows are the two that matter.
Collins has been unusually positive about the adaptation, and he’s written sequels since. Authors of source material are rarely that generous. The Depression-era setting comes from the comic too, and the film uses it for something the comic doesn’t: the sense that everybody in it is working, that the crimes are jobs, and that the family business framing isn’t a metaphor.
The Capone material is historically loose and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Frank Nitti is a real person and the film’s version of him is an invention with the right name.
The Photographer
Jude Law plays Maguire, a crime scene photographer who also kills people, and the character is the film’s one real misjudgment.
The idea is good. A man who photographs the dead for newspapers and has begun creating his own subjects is a unsettling notion, and the visual echo between his camera and the film’s own compositions is intentional.
The execution is too broad. He’s bad teeth, a leer and a sing-song delivery, and he belongs in a more expressionist film than this one. Every scene he’s in tilts toward the grotesque while the rest of the picture is held in absolute restraint. The confrontation in the bath house at the end is the one place he works, because the setting matches the tone he’s been playing in from the start.
It’s instructive as a failure. The character is simply pitched to a different film, and the mismatch is visible in every scene he shares with Hanks.
Mendes has defended the choice as intentional contrast. I don’t think it works, and I think it’s the only thing in the film that doesn’t.
Tonal consistency across a cast is a director’s problem in film and a writer’s problem in prose, and the failure mode is exactly this: one character written to a different scale than everybody around them. The reason it happens is that a heightened character is more fun to write. Maguire has the memorable lines and the memorable look, and on the page he would have felt like the strongest thing in the draft. In context he’s the weakest, because he’s asking the reader to adjust their expectations mid-book.
The test is to read your most vivid character’s scenes immediately after your most restrained ones. If the reader would have to recalibrate how the book behaves, you have two tones and you’ll have to pick. Pull the vivid one down toward the rest instead of lifting the rest toward it, because restraint makes the one or two heightened moments land.
Should you watch Road to Perdition?
Yes. I rate it an 8 because it’s that rare gorgeous film where every frame deserves its place, with Hall’s photography and one of Newman’s last screen performances both coming from people at the top of their trade. The point it loses goes to the saggy middle and to Jude Law’s leering photographer, who seems to have walked in from a louder movie. The piano scene and the rain sequence are worth the whole film on their own.
