on the road to perdition max allan collins

Half soldier, half indentured servant, Michael goes on murderous errands whose purpose he never questions. Who can understand this unsmiling, mysterious man who kills routinely? As an orphaned child, Sullivan was saved from the streets by John Rooney (Paul Newman), the hearty, vicious crime boss of the small Illinois city they all live in. Throughout the movie, Mendes tries to sustain the boy's baffled view of his father, a stolid figure with a small mustache and a stiff walk. (Tyler Hoechlin), watches from the hallway. There isn't a joke or a touch of wit anywhere in the movie.Īs Michael Sullivan (Hanks) gets ready for dinner at home with his family-he unbuttons his jacket and removes his gun-his awed twelve-year-old son, Michael, Jr. But, judged by the standards of the original 'Scarface' or 'Bonnie and Clyde' or 'The Godfather,' or even 'Bugsy,' this is a stilted, self-conscious piece of work-a case of dark-toned academic classicism. Visually, the movie is all of a piece, and consistently impressive, and I enjoyed some of it very much. Hall's palette is muted and precise, the action sudden, swift, and bloody. Hall and the veteran costume designer Albert Wolsky, drew visual ideas and moods from old movies and comic books, distilling the memory of crime fiction-not the memory of crime-into imagery that couldn't possibly be more iconic: the flat farmland and grim industrial cities of the Midwest the black Fords and Buicks, their rectangular tops gleaming in the wet as they steam along country roads the long-coated thugs, faces in shadow, inexorably going about their business in warehouses, in hotel rooms, in brothels, in the street. Mendes, along with his collaborators, the cinematographer Conrad L.

Precipitation of such intensity is not really a form of weather it's closer to a spiritual condition, a portent of sin and violence in a fallen world. Rain matters, too, buckets of it-I haven't seen rain come down quite this strenuously since the noir movies of the forties and fifties. 'Road to Perdition,' which is directed by the talented Englishman Sam Mendes ('American Beauty'), is not as eccentric as 'Crossing,' but fedoras do matter in it, as do long dark coats, and the thick weave and bulk of men's suits from 1931. In that tale of baroque complication, the Coens included such oddball visual motifs as a fedora flying through the autumn woods.

'Road to Perdition,' starring Tom Hanks as a Depression-era hit man, is a solemnly beautiful art concept-perhaps the most thoroughly stylized gangster picture since the Coen brothers' 'Miller's Crossing,' from 1990.

On the road to perdition max allan collins