Road to Perdition:

at a NYC screening, with the director
Full review

by Paula Eisenberg

(July 13, 2002) The Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center is a smallish, intimate moviehouse, and the people assembled for cocktails and a private screening of the new Dreamworks film Road to Perdition last Monday night were predisposed to like the movie. Most of them were from the New York financial community and had provided funding to get Dreamworks off the ground in 1994. Not a tough room, in other words.

Tom Hanks and Tyler Hoechlin in Road to Perdition Photo © Dreamworks SKG

The mood, already cheery, lifted even more when a tall, balding fellow in a dark suit strode to the front of the theater and welcomed the group. He was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the "K" in Dreamworks SKG, the rest of the monogram standing for Spielberg and Geffen. To polite applause, he introduced Road to Perdition's director, young Sam Mendes.

Mendes thanked Katzenberg and Dreamworks for creating a stimulating and almost stress-free environment in which to make movies. He said the film was originally much longer and more violent, and the studio wanted changes. Cutting the footage wasn't easy, but, according to Mendes, the experience was a postive one. "Nobody at Dreamworks ever yells. Nobody. That's extremely rare in this business." With a bow to Katzenberg, Mendes invited the audience to enjoy the movie, and the lights came down.

Sam Mendes

It's hard to imagine the film as it existed before some violence hit the cutting room floor. Even in the pantheon of violent gangster movies, this one stands out for its unrelenting mood of menace and just-on-the-brink mayhem. The gore is shown in an elegant, almost restrained way, especially in an eerily poetic rain-drenched scene in which an almost disembodied killer silently rakes a group of dark-suited men with a fusillade of gunfire, with only the haunting score on the soundtrack.

Some will call Road to Perdition an art film. Like American Beauty, it's visually arresting, lyrical and full of portent. Also like American Beauty, it manages to be trite even as it reaches for grandeur. The plot's predictability is eventually its undoing; even as we're manipulated into caring about what happens to the characters, we see each tragic moment coming a mile away, and we're numb by the time the credits roll.

The smell of Oscar is in the air, because Hollywood loves this kind of movie.

Road to Perdition, Rated R

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