Perdition"
is the name of a fictional settlement along a quiet Lake Michigan
beach in the film Road to Perdition.
The movie, however, begins in suburban Illinois, and the principal
characters, Michael Sullivan (played by Tom Hanks) and twelve-year-old
Michael, Jr. (played by Tyler Hoechlin), end up in Perdition
by a route that can best be described as the duble entendre
of the title. Narrated in the beginning by Michael, Jr., the
film begins in early 1931 and tracks six weeks of their lives,
mostly on the run. The story revolves around a rivalry between
Michael, Sr., and Connor Rooney (played by Daniel Craig).
Connor is the biological son of John Rooney (played by Paul
Newman), who is a close associate of Al Capone and gangland
kingpin of a suburban Illinois town, whereas Michael is an
orphan who was taken under John Rooney's wing and brought
into the mob as Rooney's enforcer. One night, while Michael
is out on a job, Connor decides to get even with his rival
by killing Sullivan's wife and children. Michael, Jr., who
hides in his father's car that night, and thus is not among
those slain by Connor, learns for the first time how his father
earns his keep. A hit man known as the Angel of Death, Sullivan
is determined to murder Connor to even the score. One day
Michael, Sr., takes his son to Chicago. He applies for a job
with Frank Nitti (played by Stanley Tucci), provided that
he is allowed to settle his personal score, but the Capone
mob cannot agree to such a deal. Indeed, Nitti realizes that
Michael is a loose cannon who must be stopped, so he hires
Maguire (played by Jude Law) to snuff out both Michaels, but
John Rooney vetoes the murder of Michael's son, even though
he might continue the feud later on. When Michael, Sr., realizes
that there is a contract out on him, he trains his son to
drive a car so that he will have fast wheels awaiting him
as he robs banks. But the money he takes is from secret safe
deposit boxes of Capone money, not a strategy designed to
neutralize the mob. On one occasion, he gets hold of account
ledgers that prove that Connor Rooney is embezzling his father's
funds, hoping to turn father against son, but all to no avail.
Then Michael murders Connor, hoping to curry favor with Nitti,
who is unimpressed. Finally, Michael takes his son to Perdition,
but the ending is happy only for the latter, whose voiceover
reiterates the same conundrum posed in the beginning, "Was
his father a good man?" Directed by Sam Mendes and based
on the novel by Max Allan Collins, Road to Perdition
is a slow-moving study of the gangland mobs of the 1920s and
1930s from the point of view of a relatively unimportant gunslinger.
The film seeks to explain the bodycount from gang warfare,
something that neither The Untouchables
(1987) nor The Godfather (1972)
attempted. Perhaps the most eloquent explanation for why Michael
was trapped in a life of crime comes midway through the film,
when father tells son Michael to wait for him in a large room
where unemployed men are reading newspapers, waiting to be
called up for job interviews. Although the mob got rich in
part by supplying illegal booze, a point that the film makes
very gently, Road to Perdition also shows that the mob easily
bribed local police. In short, Road to Perdition
continues the strange American ritual of romanticizing crazed
lawbreakers, especially cold-blooded killers. MH
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