To begin, this is my partner's favorite film, a fact that I have known for quite some time. After finally taking a look at it, I can see a great deal of why that is, which I will get into. However, that makes me somewhat hesitant to present my thoughts on its themes and efforts in presenting them. Maybe it is a bit easier to present your thoughts to an anonymous screen (as much as you care for the readers behind them) than it is to share them with someone whose opinion you respect and who you know will be able to approach you regarding your own (and suddenly, Youtube comment sections make so much sense). Second...it's Super Bowl weekend. It's not that the upcoming matchup itself has had any impact on my critique here, but...maybe I better understand now why athletics plays such a huge role in our society - specifically, its asset as a shield from circumstances like the ones in this story. I'll explain.
CLASSIC FILM CORNER #20: ROAD TO PERDITION
Here's the first problem: this is a story that really packs a more powerful punch if you don't know the specific details going in (speaking from experience). With that in mind, I will try to be as vague as possible when describing its details and hope it serves to justify my later positions. Imagine yourself in the Great Depression right at its worst point, and you're 12 years old. In spite of seeing others around you suffering from the effects of economic upheaval, you and you brother are raised in a comfortable environment by your parents and even have the time to sell newspapers when not in school. Your father (here, played by Tom Hanks) has a job helping a wealthy elder man (Paul Newman) with "dangerous missions" and he loves your whole family like his own. But when suspicious of his job and why he seems to be more distant towards you, you follow your father on one of his jobs when he's accompanied by the wealthy man's son (Daniel Craig, more unstable than Bond here). Something goes wrong and you are sworn to secrecy when discovered, but that does not prevent increasingly worse events from occurring. In desperation, your home must be abandoned, and in the process, you and your father must come to trust each other even as you try to determine how to find a safer, better life.
At this point, if you were this kid, ask yourself: could you say your father is a good man?
This may seem unusual, but I am first going to give my review in a more general sense, and then reanalyze this review in a spoiler-based territory. It seems most reasonable and necessary in this situation. Put bluntly, the acting does not have a flaw in it, with each character displaying the tormenting conflict of emotions necessary to carry the scenes laid out by director Sam Mendes (in his pre-Skyfall days, showing the same ability to show dark concepts in a subtle, respectful manner). And in turn, every scene is magnified tenfold by Conrad Hall's masterful cinematography. This film got nominated for six Oscars and only won one; but if one alone was given, I'm glad it was posthumously given to Hall for his work here. However, at times the script (by David Self) does seem to find solutions a bit too conveniently, particularly with the ending; and there are mistakes made by particular characters that you can maybe attribute to it being 1931 but otherwise seeming very out-of-character. But these are minor at best, and don't significantly impair my recommendation of this film.
Hopefully, that will suffice for those who have not seen it. But now, let's dive further in. In advance, I apologize for this format if it's an odd shift, but for me, this is a film in need of reflection and not merely rating in terms of happy face logos. Skip ahead to the end if you want to avoid heavy detail.
*********************SPOILER
ALERT********************
I
attempted to be subtle in my prior description, but maybe I did not do as
adequate a job. Basically, the boy from
the above description, Michael Sullivan, Jr., comes to discover that his father
works as a hitman for a mob boss (the elder man is named John Rooney), thereby
explaining his decent state of living in a time when millions of "honest
men" were homeless. His discovery
of his father's true line of work comes from hiding in his car on an
"errand", which diverges from basic questioning when Rooney's soon
Connor (Craig) kills one of Rooney's associates and leads to the elder Sullivan
needing to "dispatch" all other witnesses. Connor panics after the preteen is found, and
to put it mildly, the Michaels cannot bring the mother and brother along to
wherever they flee. At that point, the
father finds himself pulled into a demand for revenge addressed to mobsters
like his former boss and associate Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci), eventually
leading to shift from him pointing a gun to one (held by Jude Law) being
directed at him - even as he tries to find a safe environment for his son to
grow up.
One
thing this film does quite well is to examine how good humans are at finding
ways to justify their actions. In other
words, it is not so often that objectively evil acts are labeled as
definitively "evil". To begin,
one's upbringing is emphasized as a crucial influence. It is pointed out that the "Hitman"
of sorts was orphaned and then raised by the older Rooney, to the point where
Connor fears that he receives less love and affection. On top of that, present circumstances can do
a great deal to sway anyone. After
Michael, Jr. finds out about his dad's occupation, the mother reacts to the
news in a way that indicates she knew all along what was going on from "9
to 5". Recently, I watched a
reviewer comment on bullying in the following way (loosely paraphrasing):
"The only people you should care about are yourself, your family and your
friends. Seriously, f**k everyone
else". And you really get that vibe
from this story, with the characters embracing it to the nth degree. Then again, this tale demonstrates how that
can go terribly wrong, since you are part of that "everyone else" to
most other people; and what if they approach their actions in the same way?
In that sense, the characterization of the elder Michael, especially after half his family is decimated, strikes me as shockingly inconsistent. This is a man who brings his own son in to help him rob banks, to serve as a getaway driver, and to listen to him no matter what "in order to stay alive". But he's not responding to the Mobster environment in general, or even to the elder Rooney for condoning his son's brutality without permission. That much he accepts as part of what he signed up for. No, his goal appears to simply be to kill Connor in retaliation, even if it jeopardizes the only flesh and blood he has left. We can't say it is all for the sake of his son's future, because it is shown that he could have been offered a job elsewhere and even substantial money if he'd walked away. Admittedly, we cannot take the mobsters at their word either, as is heavily indicated, but the point remains the same:
A: Get away from this hellhole, give my son the best chance of survival.
B: Move on and begin work anew, giving
my son a good chance of survival and allowing him
to be cared for even after I am gone.
C: Stay in this realm of chaos long enough to
carry this out, complete revenge even if it means my son
has less chance of survival.
Like it
or not, by choosing C (which I believe he does), the father succumbed to a dualistic state: working to
preserve his son's safety, even as he was instinctively acting in a way that endangered
that very goal. It indeed makes
for intriguing character flaws, and while it makes for some confusing character
motivation, it is largely compensated for by making the more mature (?)
Sullivan aware of them. At one point, it
is pointed out to him that he knew the line of his work and that once they all
died, none of them (including Hitman himself) would see Heaven. Michael, Sr.'s response? "Michael (his son) could." As discretely indicated (and later, outright
screamed) to the audience, it may be that his father is not worried about his
son's physical safety but his spiritual well-being. It may be that A might have pulled his son
into killing out of his own revenge and B from mere exposure, which would go
against what the boy's instincts actually are.
In that sense, compared to losing his life on Earth, helping his boy
lose Heaven is the much worse alternative in the long run.
Motivated to dispatch evil for the wrong reasons, or pushed into evil actions for the right ones. Our ties to our loved ones can define who we are, for better or worse. If nothing else, Michael Sullivan, Sr. was a father. Kudos to the film for pointing it out, even if its delivery left something to be desired.
*******************END
SPOILER ALERT **********************
For
those of you who skipped the asterisk-surrounded region, instead of giving details to the film away, let me
bring you back into the conversation with my view of the NFL. Over the past month, we have seen stories of
romance that wasn't real, recoveries that seem to have occurred far too
quickly, and champions that turned out to be desperate for victory at any cost
(be it decency to teammates or even his own dignity, as his jersey matched the
sun he wanted to find his place in). We
don't come to sports for those sorts of complications, since life is difficult
enough to judge already. We like having transparent
heroes and villains, with the stories of revenge and insurmountable odds ones
that can be immediately believed and fully invested in. Maybe it is because we want to feel like when
we see right and witness wrong, we'll be able to tell - and that if we see
ourselves as doing alright, we can thus trust in that too.
But we
rarely have that. Athletes who use drugs
are often desperate to make a good living, to provide for loved ones and to
make their small window of utilizing their talents as profitable as
possible. Betrayals and broken trust is
more often developed from poor communication, confusion, and loss of control than
outright malevolence. Cheating may come
gradually and out of pain, terrorists may be heroes elsewhere, and those who
seem to outright kill (like elder Sullivan) may be doing so as a mean to
prevent the same from happening to their loved ones. Does this mean that all beliefs in good and
evil are relative? Some would say that,
but upon reflection...I wouldn't go that far.
It is that firmness in an absolute morality that prevents the value of
our actions from being outright trivialized.
All I am saying is that most are probably wandering back and forth in
the middle of the morality spectrum, doing their best to defend what they care
about and thus be pulled closer to the end of the line radiating light.
Road to
Perdition understands this, and sympathizes with it even as it condemns the
tendency. We shouldn't regard anyone as
the "other" but that is difficult to do; and the elder Sullivan (and
most of the mobsters, for that matter) emerge as desperate to protect their
loved ones, even at the cost of their own souls. I can now see why this is my partner's
favorite film. I could refer to its
emotional depth, superb atmosphere, and its use of fine-grained subtlety and
detail, but if I had to guess, it's his favorite for another reason: it's not
an easy film, even as it's easy to comprehend.
It challenges audiences to look at what they value, and if they can come
to understand that that is how others steer their lives as well.
In that sense, again I ask: in the
scenario given above, could you imagine saying your father is a good man? What about yourself, in your own life
as it currently is? As for
me, I'll be honest: at times, I struggle to believe that I have always led a
good life. But as flawed as
I am, I can fairly confidently say that I've usually tried my best to do right with
what's important, and I think this film would argue that most other humans in
their wandering lives are to be judge similarly.
[Final Rating: 4.5
stars out of 5]
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