Road to Perdition (2002) Review

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, which tells you in the first minute that he survives and that this is a memory being assembled by somebody who loved a man he probably should not have.

It came directly after American Beauty, which had won Sam Mendes an Academy Award for his first film, and it is a considerably better piece of work that almost nobody rates as highly.

The 8 is for a film that is beautiful without being empty, which is 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 is a good idea that never belongs in this film’s register.

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 has to be the getaway driver. He learns to watch the door. He learns which banks his father is willing to rob and which he is not, and why the distinction matters.

The father teaches competence because competence is all he has to give, and each lesson brings the boy closer to the life he is trying to prevent him entering. There is 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 does not 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 is the most honest ending available. Not forgiveness, not condemnation, just the fact of the relationship, which is what a memory of a parent really consists of.

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.

There is 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, which is the opposite of everything an audience brings to him, and he does not soften it once. He is 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, which means the son’s question about whether there was anything in him at all remains genuinely open.

Paul Newman, in his last live-action role, plays a man who loves both his surrogate son and his real son and knows he will 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 travelling 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, which is rare, and has written sequels since.

The Depression-era setting comes from the comic too, and the film uses it for something the comic does not: the sense that everybody in it is working, that the crimes are jobs, and that the family business framing is not a metaphor.

The Capone material is historically loose and does not 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 genuinely unsettling notion, and the visual echo between his camera and the film’s own compositions is intentional.

The execution is too broad. He has bad teeth, a leer and a sing-song delivery, and he belongs in a more expressionist film than this one. Every scene he is 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 register he has been playing in from the start.

It is instructive as a failure. The character is not badly written and the performance is not lazy. It 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 do not think it lands, and I think it is the only thing in the film that does not.

Should you watch Road to Perdition?

Yes, and watch it for the photography and for Newman, both of which are last works by people at the top of their trade. Expect a slow middle and a character who does not fit. The piano scene and the rain sequence are worth the whole film.

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