DarkObserver, 14. Oktober 2002 um 16:17:12 MESZ

Tom Hanks can actually act

I've just seen "Road to Perdition", starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.

It's a story set in the 1930's, prohibition is in effect and the mobsters are running whole towns. Tom Hanks plays favorite hit-man to Paul Newman's Irish Mafia elder character, but their relationship takes a turn to the downside, after one of Hanks' sons catches a glimpse of the sort of "work" his daddy does for "uncle Rooney" (Newman).

I liked the visual style of this movie a lot. It contains a lot of grays and it seems to be raining almost all the time. Okay, it's a film-noir or rather an homage to this genre, so that's to be expected.

The biggest surprise -to me at least- was the acting of Tom Hanks. He used to sit in my mind as the sort of likable goof-ball he played in "Forrest Gump" or as lead in romantic comedies, like the one that had him opposite Meg Ryan.

I never found him quite believable in dead-serious roles as in "Saving Private Ryan". Although as the prison guard in "The Green Mile" his always sort of sorrowful-looking face suggested for the first time that this man could portray a more dramatic character.

In "Road to Perdition" he nicely affirms this notion. Kudos to him. There are a couple of scenes, in which his face is partially overshadowed by the brim of his hat (Fedora?!) and one can clearly see the deep lines on his face running down to his unshaven chin, that are simply great. He looks...intense and he believably conveys the desperation his character must feel, who, after losing his wife and one of his sons, has to do what a man has to do: Take revenge, even if it means going against an enemy far mightier than thou.

Paul Newman is still great too even if his age is starting to show but if anyone of us will still look like him in old age we can consider us lucky. There's one sequence that has him and Hanks play a pas de deux on the piano and when I saw it, it appeared to me like a passing of the torch, as if Newman was implicitly saying: "Here, you're the one who ought to follow in my footsteps". But I could be wrong, since the scene was also meant to depict how close their two characters are, before they turn against each other.

The movie was directed by Tom Mendes, who gave us "American Beauty". His films always contain someone shooting their -or someone else's - brains out, it seems and they're sad and say that life is a dire undertaking, full of sacrifice. But on the other hand they leave room for change, for transformation -and hope.