Road To Perdition

Look in ya previews, Tom! Look in ya previews! MOONLIGHT MILE–Susan Sarandon. Dustin Hoffman. Holly Hunter. You think these guys are going for an Oscar here?

It’s the story of a young man (Jake Gyllenhaal–good to see him eschewing from typical teen fare after the amazing Donnie Darko brought him to a lot of peoples’ attention) who can’t get over the death of his fiancee. He hangs out at her house with her parents and dwells on the accident.

And it was written and directed by Brad Silberling who was once a young man who couldn’t get over the death of his girlfriend, Rebecca Schaeffer. (She was the actress from “My Sister Sam” who was shot by a stalker.)

This actually looks really, really good and, since it comes from the heart, I sincerely hope that it IS good. (Not to mention the fact that it went through two Beatles’ titles (Baby’s In Black and Goodbye Hello–I know it’s reversed…work with me, here) to get to a Rolling Stones’ title.)

ONE HOUR PHOTO–But this is the one I’m really excited about! Robin Williams playing a stalker! He’s a lonely, lonely man who works at the photo booth. All of his customers seem to like him, but only a little kid sees just how lonely he really is. Then he (Robin) decides to do something about it.

After a very dark turn in Death To Smoochy (which only I seemed to like), a killer role in Insomnia (which I still haven’t seen, dammit!) and a return to stand-up (his new HBO special is awesome) I think we’re having a real Robin Renaissance. And I like it, Steve. I LIKE it!

ANALYZE THAT–Once upon a time there was a man named Robert, and he was one of the greatest actors the world has ever seen. He could turn in amazing performances and make it seem as effortless as sitting at this computer surfing the web. Then, suddenly, something happened. He started to actually believe that it was easy. Now it seems that the most interesting thing he can do is parody himself…and boy can he ever do that. Analyze This and Meet The Parents were VERY funny movies. Can the sequels match up? Well, if this teaser is any indication, no. Analyze That, anyway, looks to be more of the same. Then again, all it is is seeing (and hearing, for the most part) Bobby cry his eyes out and then seeing Billy Crystal slap the shit out of him.

I wasn’t very amused. I’ll see it, though. THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE–Is Thandie Newton out to remake all of Carey Grant’s movies? First it was Notorious with that Cruise guy (ok, so M:I2 wasn’t a direct remake, but it may as well have been) and now she’s remaking Charade with (GASP!) Mark Wahlberg. Jonathan Demme directs, but John Woo directed the other one. And we all know how great that was. (Can you detect the sarcasm?)

As long as Marky doesn’t try to recreate the face that Carey makes at the end of the original, all will be fine. Or, at least bearable. Maybe.

By the way, Tim Robbins is in the Walther Matthau role, so that’ll be good. But he was in Antitrust, too, so…

Now I’ll show you a movie you can’t…

Nevermind. That was almost terrible. How ’bout just:

Let’s get to woik.

What do you get when you take a British stage director, cast an All-American nice guy as a cold-blooded killer, an American icon as his mob boss and a too handsome British rising star as a slimy photographer/killer?

Hollywood’s only summer movie to deserve any highfalutin award they throw at it. (Unless you count Spider-Man and Attack Of The Clones…but that’s pure dreaming.)

British director Sam Mendes is well on his way to redefining every known American lifestyle on film. His first film was a deep look at suburban America. Now he turns his cameras on Prohibition Era gangster life. What’s next? A baseball bio-pic?

Whatever. I’ll go see it because he hasn’t mis-stepped yet.

This time out he helps to tell the story of Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks), a hitman who tries to balance his violent work life with his home life. His boss, John Rooney (Paul Newman) helped to make him the man he is today and sees him as more of a son than his own son, Connor (Daniel Craig from Tomb Raider and Elizabeth). Connor is a live-wire who kills with more glee and has more of a superiority complex than Sonny Corleone.

On the home front, Mike has his family. His two young sons, Michael, Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) and Peter (Liam Aiken from Henry Fool and Stepmom), don’t know what their dad does. (Just to make this easy, Mike=Tom and Michael=Tyler.) They only know that he doesn’t talk much and anytime they ask about his work they get a stern look and a “He puts food on your table. That’s all you need to know, young man.” Mike appears to love his boys, but you would be hard pressed to tell with just a cursory glance. His wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), gets a little more affection, but not much.

Things are going fine until Michael decides to ride along with his dad and Connor to a job that goes wrong. He sees his dad kill some guys from another gang and is suddenly a threat to security. After Annie and Peter are killed, Mike and Michael go on the run for their own survival. And, over the next six weeks, Michael learns a little more about his father. But Mike finally gets to know his oldest son.

Like the best examples of just about any genre, if you stripped away the violence and gangsters out you would get a great universal story about fatherhood and the love and loyalty between a father and son. Mike and Michael find out that there is a man under the skin of the other one. Mike and John find out just how much they mean to each other. And Connor just yearns for acceptance from his own father.

But when you put the mob back in you get one of the most effective gangster films since Miller’s Crossing. (Goodfellas almost counts, but the technicality that it’s not a “traditional gangster” movie pulls it out of the running. It’s in a class all its own.)

The performances are all amazing. Of course Tom and Paul are separately, but when they’re together there’s a magic on the screen. Not only when they play piano together near the beginning at a wake, but in their final scenes together, too. You get the feeling of two men who have honed their craft to more than a science.

Can eternal nice-guy Tom Hanks play a cold-blooded killer? And how. (And I don’t use that term, well, ever actually.) But it works because he doesn’t really play him as cold-blooded, just cold. And there is a difference. One has no feelings, the other has deep ones. He just doesn’t know how to show them anymore. Tom is so good in this role that, at times, I almost forgot that it was him. (Now, THAT’S a hard thing to do.) There was only one scene where he almost let some of his old self show through. Watch him when he’s teaching Michael how to drive. You can almost hear the Scott Turner that he’s buried deep down within him. (And don’t we all want him to find that again? Just for a little while? Then he can go back to his lofty, ambitious projects that we all love him for now.)

It’s still so very strange to see him pull the trigger.

Newman is, of course, amazing. At 77 years old he’s still at the top of his game and ain’t nobody gonna shake him off. He plays the mob boss with a winning combination of gusto and heart that can only come from years of playing likable assholes. Yeah, he seems like your best friend, but you know deep down that he could fuck you up. And what made all of this even more believable is the fact that he chose to play John with only the slightest of Irish accents. Not over done and not cloying. Just enough so that you know that this guy is first generation, but he’s been over here and in power for a long, long time.

Then there’s Jude Law. He plays the real cold-blooded killer in the movie (besides, of course, Connor), Harlen Maguire. He’s actually a photographer who takes pictures of dead bodies for business and pleasure. Sometimes he even goes so far as to kill the not so much dead ones to get a better shot. He’s slimy, disgusting and, most of all, just plain bad. And Jude goes for it all and, as always, he nails it.

Stanley Tucci has a smallish, but pivotal role of Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s right hand man. He plays him with a coolness that Billy Drago forgot about back in The Untouchables. But a comparison of the two films does bring to mind a good question: Was Nitti an actual hitman or was he a deskman who hired all of his hits out? Probably a bit of both, but who knows? Well, probably historians, but we won’t get into that.

But I think the real surprise is Tyler Hoechlin. If he hadn’t worked hard to keep up with the big boys, this movie would have folded under the pressure. But he was up to it and puts in a great performance. Let’s hope that Hollywood doesn’t do to him what they’ve done to kids like Adrian Grenier, who put in one great performance in a little movie and now can’t get anything better than a walk on part in a Spielberg movie and a lead role in a cage in the form of Drive Me Crazy and Harvard Man. (Ok, so he’s only a year younger than me…not really a kid. But he still plays high school kids, so what’s the difference?)

But getting back to Tyler, he does need to do something about those eyebrows. He’s only, like, 14 and he already only has one big one.

Mendes has done an amazing job of bringing the mythos of the American gangster to the screen one more time and making it feel new again. He seems to understand their world better than a lot of filmmakers today. And, with the help of DP Conrad Hall (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and American Beauty), he can show us his understanding. This film has the best use of the “gangster hat shot” that I’ve seen in a long, long time. (You know the one. Camera is shooting straight down on the top of the gangster’s hat as he walks through a doorway and it whips around to finally show us his face as he walks down the long hallway. Great shot.) And, even though there’s a lot of violence in the film, since Conrad abhors violence of any kind, it all takes place off camera, and is all the more effective for it. Only two small splats of blood are ever shown to come out of a body. Even a shot to the head doesn’t show us any blood. (Although that was a little unrealistic.)

The story (with the exception of the Maguire character which was added to make the two Michael’s run from something) is based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins, which is, in turn, based partly on true facts and partly on the earlier graphic novel/movie series Lone Wolf And Cub. (Michael’s constant reading of his Lone Ranger book is part symbolic of Mike’s quest and part homage to the story’s origins–although it is apparently anachronistic. The Lone Ranger wasn’t created until a couple of years after the events of the movie take place.) And you can definitely see where the samurai influence comes into Mike’s character. He’s alone in the world. A hired gun who suddenly doesn’t want to do it anymore, but knows that only violence will end violence. And the end of the film, just like the end of American Beauty, is not very shocking, but it still packs a wallop because of what you really want to happen.

Leave it to a British guy to tell us Americans how our icons should be filmed.