Road to Perdition

by Stephanie Anderson

Living in Austria afforded me the media protection of having only heard two things about Road to Perdition upon entering the theatre: 1) that it was about gangsters; and 2) that it moved too slowly. The former was true, and thankfully the latter was not. But knowing only the cast was enough to entice me to buy the ticket. Tom Hanks has the luxury of being particular about scripts and he usually does good work (I will forgive him for wasting two hours of my life with Castaway). Jude Law needs nothing more than Gattaca (and his good looks) on his resume. And Paul Newman ate 50 eggs.

All this together makes Road to Perdition your classic, bloody, suspenseful mobster film. I cannot say that it moved to slowly, because the whole time I was clinging to the arms of my chair thinking: "Turn around!... You're gonna get shot... oh no!" Eyes squeeze shut just enough so I can still see through little slits.. "Ooooh gross! He should've turned around."
The plot line is pretty basic gangster stuff: One guy gets killed, another guy has to get killed to cover up the first murder, then someone sees that killing, so another guy gets killed, but then someone gets mad about that guy and wants to get revenge on the killer, but of course the killer isnít a fan of that idea, so he is trying to kill him. Kill, kill, kill, basically. But you would be surprised how riveting they can make that storyline.

Tom Hanks, as suspected, does a good job playing the gangster that we are supposed to empathize with. He changes gears a bit abruptly mid-film, as he starts out as a hard man who doesn't speak to anyone, but then, an hour in, he suddenly develops a sarcastic sense of humor. Jude Law excellently portrays a creepy photographer and part-time assassin. He is appropriately and impressively sinister and scary, almost to the point of being cliché, but it works in the role. Paul Newman is running the show in the middle-America, 1930s gangster scene. Sad to say, he does well in the grandfather/godfather role, because, hey, he's getting old.

The film has a few flaws, one of them being the title, and another the narrator. The title is wrong because it is ridiculously obvious. For those of you without your Webster's handy: perdition: Entire loss; utter destruction; ruin; esp., the utter loss of the soul, or of final happiness in a future state; future misery or eternal death. Simply, the title means "The Road to Hell." If this title were not flagrant enough for a gangster movie, the town where Tom Hanks' character is seeking asylum is called Perdition. This overt abuse of destination names has only been successful in one instance: A Knight's Tale (Movie of the Year, 2001). Heath Ledger and his fellow vagabonds ask for directions from a naked Geoffery Chaucer. "Is this the road to Rouen?" (pronounced like ëruiní, for the French minors out there) they inquire, and he responds "That remains to be seen." So clever, but still only one line, hidden in scrolls of an excellent script. Even the brilliant minds that compile movies aimed at a teenage audience wouldn't dream of trying to make one pun line the title of an entire film. Either the town of asylum or the movie can be called Perdition, not both. Then it would be a good literary device.

Secondly, the movie begins and ends with the narration of a boy- Tom Hanks' characters' son. Much along the same lines of Grammar School speech classes, this serves to "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them." To bad they are trying to make a 2-hour film about good, bad, and mortality, rather than a 5-minute speech explaining to 7th graders how to make chocolate chip cookies. Along with being superfluous, the narrator is also too young to be effective. The voice is feasibly only a couple years older than his character in the movie- his voice hasn't even dropped yet. But the scripted narration seems to be written for an old man looking back and explaining his life. Maybe when the producers had the idea they forgot to note that the only reason it works in "The Wonder Years" is because the narrator is obviously a sight more mature than the Kevin Arnold that is dating Winnie Cooper.

The title may be unavoidably cliché, but you can skip the stupid narrator by walking in five minutes late. And otherwise, you will have 2 hours of entertainment about a subject that has not been done justice on the silver screen since Goodfellas.