so. last night i saw road to perdition.. wow. moderate spoilers follow...
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for those of you who hate organic web-shooters, this movie is not for you. for you purists who hate it when anything is changed from book to screen, chalk it up to hollywood, and walk away. the movie is different from the book. this is the way things go, and i for one never mind it, if it is done well. that is, if the filmmakers can sell me the change, i'm good to go. a perfect example of this was, well, spider-man. i bought all the changes hook line and sinker. less successful was Jurassic Park. the first one. the rest were schlock, and we all know it, so i won't go into them. but the first made all these changes to an extremely cinematic book and i just didn't buy them. i had a great time at the film, but it was sort of loosely based on the novel, or inspired by it, maybe, and i think the story was better on paper.
that said, road to perdition, too, is greatly different from the novel that it's based on, but i bought the whole kit and kaboodle. there are a few reasons for this.
quickly, the book is about a mob enforcer in the 30's who is betrayed by his boss because his (the enforcer's) 12 year old son saw something he shouldn't have. the boss's grown son takes it upon himself to murder the enforcer's wife and the kid's little brother, and so the enforcer (michael o'sullivan, a.k.a. the angel of death) is forced to take his boy on the lam, and he wreaks his vengeance on the mob. lots of people die, lots of money is stolen, and the ending is somewhat tragic. we meet al capone, and frank nitti, and elliot ness, and all are intertwined in the story. anyway, the book is a masterpiece. the writing is spare, and rightly so. in the foreword, max allan collins, the writer, talks about his big influences, lone wolf and cub, dick tracy, and john woo, and they are all very evident in this story, in a good way. the art is beautiful. i'm not normally big on black and white comics -- i find them hard to read... but Richard Rayner has an incredible style with shadows that must be seen to be believed. the pencils are fine, but his inks are out of this world.
now, the film is masterfully made by sam mendes, who made my favorite movie of the last decade, american beauty.. mendes use of color here is astounding, as it seems almost the film is in black and white, but tinted like those old photos from the 30s and 40s. every once in a while the screen is splashed with the red of someone's blood. there are amazing pieces of craft here: a tommy-gun massacre that is totally silent, a scene where two characters both know that something is up, and the tension is built by just cutting back and forth on their faces for about 90 seconds. and mendes obviously has some images in his system that he wasn't finished with in AB... here again we see the family dining at a table, set as if on a proscenium stage. again we see the brain splatter of blood on a wall behind a victim. but mendes' chicago is much grittier than his suburbs, and the depression and prohibition are very successfully portrayed.
also successfully portrayed were the main characters: michael sullivan (the o' is dropped... why? hollywood is full of crazy people.) is given an amazing amount of humanity by tom hanks. hanks, whose work i always like, and whose choice in material i almost always deplore, has never been better. a man torn between his sense of duty to his only son and murdered family and his own father-figure/employer, sullivan is also a killing machine. in the book, he is an incredible john woo badass... here, hanks shows us the man behind the machine, and makes us realize here's a guy who did a job (killing) and must use his skills to do what he needs to do to feel whole again. as john rooney (again a change... the book's clan is the looney gang. go figure.), paul newman brings his ice-blue eyes to the front, letting us see through them the man who must make horrible choices in order to run a business. rooney here is much more human than in the book, and man does it work... as we can now really feel sullivan's struggle. rooney was a father to him, and soon sullivan must make a horrible choice... avenge his family or let his "father" live. as the sons, we have two newcomers, tyler hoechlin as little michael sullivan and daniel craig as connor rooney. craig's portrayal is so much more than the looney of the book. here is a man who is trying desperately to please his father, while being drawn in by his life of crime, and stealing from his own family. likewise, as michael sullivan, jr., hoechlin exhibits gravity beyond his years as a kid who is forced to spend time with a father who has neglected him, but who he idolizes beyond measure.what about jude law? well, he rates his own paragraph:
in the book, the looney syndicate has so many friends that everywhere o'sullivan turns he is dodging bullets and killing gangsters. the filmmakers conflated those nameless thugs into one hitman, hired by frank nitti (a delightful stanley tucci). an odd drifter, maguire is a crime photographer, (inspired by weegee?) who doubles as a hitman. law's eccentric portrayal is downright creepy, and his physicality is so different from the golden-boy we've seen in talented mr. ripley and gattaca, that one can sense an amazing breakout talent. i read recently that law was in talks to play joe kavalier in the film version of michael chabon's masterpiece. for this, i absolutely cannot wait.
about halfway through the picture, the screenplay--which, like its source, has very little dialogue,-- goes off on it's own thing and almost completely disregards the book. as i was talking with mike about it, i realized that this was totally neccessary. it's one thing to read a cold novel, in black and white, square paneled, and be able to put it down when you couldn't take it anymore. a comic can be about anything, because the page and art style give it a sense of remove. but a film is the most realistic of story-telling media, and with living breathing people, the ice cold grim 'n' gritty tone of the novel would make an audience turn right off. so we are given more human plot elements, things with which we can relate a bit more, and we are given incredible actors to play the story. the movie somehow feels more intimate than the book, and there is more hope on the screen, too.
look, this has been a rave, and i won't deny it. but i did miss a couple of things: i missed all the catholic imagery... o'sullivan in the book, is known as the angel of death, and is often referred to as the angel, setting up a beautiful dichotemy. he is never referred to as angel once in the film. likewise, while the plot changes made elliot ness unneccessary, i would have liked to have seen him here. watching this film reminded me of seeing the untouchables for the first time, in a huge theatre in l.a., with my dad. now that film unfortunately starred kevin costner, which now makes me sad, but elliot ness was such a cool character, and he's a great presence in the book, and i would have enjoyed him here. and while hanks' sullivan is more believable, some of those john woo badass tactics would have been fun.
while one of the great things about this picture is how well it deals with the humanizing changes from the book, perhaps my favorite thing about the filmmaking took a direct cue from my favorite thing about the book: much of the story takes place in the car, and rayner had a few panels from michael jr's pov, where he'd be looking out the window, but the glare would give him a partial reflection of himself, while still halfway making out whatever he was looking at. this very common, everyday phenomenon is rarely acknowkledged in visual media, and i thought it was just about the coolest thing i'd seen in comics when i read this book. mendes uses the same effect in the film, and it's just brilliant.
my criteria for good storytelling is simple: book, movie, or play, i want to laugh and cry. road to perdition pays off in spades.
