I’m usually a sucker for father/son dramas, but Sam Mendes’s new movie, Road to Perdition, left me quite unmoved. All the elements seem to be in place, but somehow Road to Perdition fails to communicate.
Mendes is a British stage director who made his cinematic name with the brilliantly involving American Beauty. Perhaps Mendes has snapped back into theatrical mode with Road to Perdition and that’s why it feels as though it is taking place at some distance from the viewer. Or perhaps it’s the fact that it is based on a graphic novel, a static medium that uses various tricks to accomplish the illusion of movement; Road to Perdition in some way replicates that sense of stasis. It hasn’t made the jump to full cinematic existence.
Road to Perdition is set in the Thirties. Tom Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, a hitman and fixer for an Irish Illinois crime lord, John Rooney (Paul Newman — gravitas with a twinkle). Sullivan’s son, Mike Jr (Tyler Hoechlin) is curious about what exactly dad does for a living, and isn’t satisfied with mom’s curt reply that he puts food on the table, full stop. So young Mike spies on dad, finds out that he’s not Father Christmas, and next thing everything is collapsing about his ears and the
two Mikes are on the run from Rooney and his wayward son (Daniel Craig).
In this crucible, apparently, the father/son relationship will be tested and truths come to light. Or will they? It didn’t seem to me that by the end of the movie we had learnt much we didn’t gather from the first half-hour. There are other relations that should illuminate the character of Sullivan, such as Rooney’s quasi-paternal interest in him, and Rooney’s problems with his own son, but all this feels like a rudimentary armature over which the story’s themes are strung rather than anything very troubling.
Road to Perdition is beautifully shot — every frame is washed in darkness. It veritably screams atmosphere. The period is meticulously recreated, and feels right, but it also feels like a series of tableaux in which nothing particularly engaging is happening. Perhaps the filmmakers paid so much attention to getting the look of the film perfect that they neglected everything else.
Jude Law, as another assassin, enlivens things a bit — but in a pantomime kind of way. He is a Weegee-style photographer, always the first to snap any corpse left lying around. He has dirty fingernails and bad teeth as well as a distinctly psychopathic expression on his face. He’s really bad. But comparing the Hanks and Law characters, as surely we are meant to do, feels like comparing apples and rotten oranges. Hanks may represent a better kind of hitman, but he just doesn’t make us feel for him.
Perhaps it is Hanks’s performance that lets it down. Hanks used to be an amusingly fresh-faced klutz, shining in movies such as Splash and The Man with One Red Shoe. Now, a couple of Oscars later, he’s a serious actor, and in this movie he is imitating Newman’s way of underplaying things rather than going the Law route of characterological excess. But it doesn’t work. His face, which has fleshed out and bunched up, seems stolidly expressionless; his recessed eyes can’t seem to transmit much. The people in Road to Perdition seem reduced to ciphers, as trapped in the schema of fate as they are in their darkly burnished surroundings.
The people in the other movie of the week, The Safety of Objects, are just as trapped, it seems, but they are trapped in a much livelier world. And they strain and butt up against its constraints in a way that the characters in Road to Perdition simply aren’t allowed to do.
Rose Troche’s movie is a Robert Altman movie in form, composed of the overlapping stories of several American families and individuals in various stages of meltdown. All these people are given close attention, but it is the family of Esther Gold (Glenn Close) that seems most central; certainly, Close’s stunning portrayal of clenched desperation is the movie’s lynchpin. Father/son issues are routine in American movies (Oprah could probably tell you why), but it seems the role of motherhood is usually kept as unproblematic as possible. The Safety of Objects examines motherhood unflinchingly.
Esther’s beloved son has been rendered comatose, and she is trapped between hanging on and letting go. Meanwhile, around her, other lives are spiralling into disarray. A lawyer can’t face his loss of status, a disturbed young man fixates on a child, a young boy nurtures a somewhat obsessive relationship with a Barbie doll. And so on.
It’s all about absence, loss and grief, and it all weaves together seamlessly. The clever editing helps it knit, as visual echoes jump between scenes. Troche brings wonderful, deep, honest performances from her actors: they feel crushingly real. As they fight their battles with life, and with each other, and as the story behind the story unfolds in flashback, we come to know them, and to feel for them.
The Safety of Objects is not an easy film to process, because it takes one places one may not want to go. It refuses to trivialise or over-simplify. And yet it is rivetingly watchable throughout. It offers some hope, but without denying or fudging all the reasons there are to despise the very notion of hope. Unlike, say, The Piano Teacher, the most disturbing film of recent months, it does not set out relentlessly to upset the viewer. It just does. Because we care.