Road to Perdition
dir. Sam Mendes
Dreamworks

Early in Road to Perdition, John Rooney (Paul Newman), a Midwestern mob boss, is publicly accused of acting like God. "You give and you take away," he is told. Rooney silently lets the bitterly spoken charges smack him in the face because he knows that he deserves the denouncement. In his time on earth, Mr. Rooney has taken into his hands a divine power: He ends lives.

Marking a person for death, of course, is part of the business, burdens and pleasures of being a gangster. It's also one of the primary reasons the moviegoing public is fascinated with mobsters and movies about mobsters. Is anyone — women, children, family — exempt from a mobster's fatal touch, we wonder? How are these hits carried out? How does one live with the responsibilities of murder? Distinguishing itself from the other masterpieces of it genre, Perdition superbly illustrates the different ways gangsters kill and are transformed by their killing.

Rooney, for example, has already decided that he is bound for hell. Facing that certainty, he tries not to let matters of life and death get the better of him. He entertains guests, shoots dice and plays the piano. He smiles at children and coyly asks them, "Who has a hug for a lonely old man?" He has not lost his humanity. Rooney can order a hit, but he can also be wise and merciful; you suspect he might sincerely mourn for those he's sent to the other side.

Rooney's biological son Connor (Daniel Craig) is a lesser man. Connor kills capriciously, and one of his sloppy, needless executions sets Perdition in motion. He shoots a man his father had told him only to talk to and attempts to apologize for his actions with a smug smile. It is telling that Rooney vehemently scolds his son for the senseless murder; Connor, however, never learns that other people's lives have sanctity.

By contrast, Rooney's surrogate son Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) is a muted, sensible angel of death. Unsurpassed in his professionalism, Michael nonetheless looks forward to his work like a coal miner entering a dark, dangerous mine. The constant killing has choked the color from his eyes and flattened his voice into a long, hard sigh. Michael prays his sons don't end up like their old man.

Then there is Maguire (Jude Law), a freelance assassin and grisly photojournalist. With rotting teeth and gnarly hands, Maguire is as ugly as he is amoral. He takes glee in killing the living and photographing the dead. He is a genuine psychopath walking the street.

Perdition, with its crisply colored and flawlessly framed scenes, renders each of these men and their compromised souls real. The film's screenplay also puts them exquisitely at odds. When Michael's oldest son (Tyler Hoechlin) witnesses a mob hit, Connor goes after Michael's family. Rooney is forced to take sides in the bloody dispute and chooses to protect his flesh-and-blood son over Michael, who decides to go to war with the Rooney clan, but has to do so with his eldest son in tow and Maguire on his heels.

The story is riveting and gracefully acted from start to stop, but what gives it a higher meaning is how it handles the reverberations of violence on the victims and the perpetrators. For while the cinematography is artful, the mob shootings are brutal, messy and completely unromantic. Dead bodies reveal strained and twisted faces frozen with fear and pain. You can almost smell their stench. In a few cases, we see the mourners who release muffled wails, reminding you that everyone's life matters to someone.

The murderers lose out as well. Rooney expects damnation; Michael walks through a hell on earth; Connor has become as soulless as the devil; and Maguire is twisted inside and out by his insatiable, giddy demons. These men are less than whole because of their deeds. More practically, being mobsters covered in blood, they cannot appeal to proper authorities when they feel violated. They are expected to accept the ordered death of a loved one as if it were an accounting error.

For instance, when Michael loses loved ones, he blames Connor and tells Rooney during a private meeting that Connor should be killed. Connor is a murderer, Michael argues. Rooney seems shocked by Michael's call for justice and vitriol against murderers, and he reminds his surrogate son, "There are only murderers in this room." Perdition makes clear that once you enter that room, there is no exiting.

— Rasheed Newson (rasheednewson@hotmail.com)