Like the long winters and afternoon rainfalls that it prominently features, Road to Perdition is permeated by a wistful sense of regret. Sam Mendes allows his scenes to linger artfully; Conrad Hall's cinematography makes us glad he does. But the pure power of photography becomes the film's main weakness. The camera boasts so loudly that the drama it depicts, albeit rather noisy itself, is muted. What we're left with is simultaneously a sumptuous feast and a taste of what might have been.
Tom Hanks, in his best performance since Forrest Gump, plays Michael Sullivan, an Irish hit-man in Untouchables-era Chicago, whose son (Tyler Hoechlin) witnesses one of his father's jobs and becomes a liability. The events that transpire next will spur father and son to traverse together the long road to Perdition, Ill., as they run for their lives from jealous gangsters and rival hit-men.
Foiling this story is that of the aging gang boss Mr. Rooney (Paul Newman) and his own son (Daniel Craig). The men's relationship is as complicated as it gets, but elegantly simple. With these characters, Mendes want to show us that behind the tommy-guns and trench coats of the setting's zeitgeist were broken, pathetic men. Yet his insistence on cloyingly beautiful photography belies this potentially powerful reality, simply because most of what he shows is not meant to be pretty.
By contrast, the scenes between Sullivan and his son work very well. When the initial tension between them gives way to sentiment, the film is affecting. But just when it seems that a relationship is developing, the film belabors a simple point with an overlong segment of bloody revenge. Time for character development is wasted on this obvious detour, which would have been more powerful were it short and to-the-point. Mendes would have us think that he's developing his characters with his photography, but sadly he isn't showing us anything we haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. In Road to Perdition, Mendes' camera is more concerned with the darkness and iciness of his sets and landscapes, and, by turns, of his characters' hearts. It's all purely external, and that might be the film's central problem.
Road to Perdition's parallel father/son stories are related thematically but not dramatically. When the payoff comes, it feels like Mendes has merely filled in a coloring book, rather than drawn his own picture.
