Road to Perdition, dir. Sam Mendes, 2002

Abstract

Road to Perdition, dir. Sam Mendes, 2002 Mark Brians Road to Perdition both begins and ends with a single shot: a young boy, Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin), stands on the white-grey sand of a beach by Lake Michigan. In a voiceover, Michael tells viewers about his father and how they spent "six weeks on the road … in the winter of 1931." The water extending beyond the camera's gaze forms a horizon that seems boundless, but which is the very picture of interiority—this body is a lake, not the ocean. This framing, this bordering of rest and interior stillness, is set in relief against the friction and violence that fill the rest of the film, as a panoply of characters push up against boundary and limit in several ways. Michael Sullivan Sr. (Tom Hanks) is an enforcer for Irish mobster John Rooney (Paul Newman) and his adult son Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig) in Rock Island, Illinois. Jealous of Michael's favored relationship with John and afraid that Michael will expose his embezzlement of mob money, Con-nor murders Michael's wife and youngest son. During the Sullivans's subsequent "six weeks on the road," father and son go on a robbery spree, stealing from the mob in order to force them to turn over Connor. In response, the mob employs Harlen Maguire (Jude Law) to hunt and kill the Sullivans. This chase finds Michael Sr. finally confronting John about Connor's embezzlement, of which the elder Rooney is already aware. The track of vengeance culminates in the rain, as Michael Sr. guns down John and several of his cronies with a Tommy Gun, before at last locating and killing Connor. After taking Michael Jr. to the beach where the film opened, Michael Sr. briefly finds peace; just moments later, though, he and Harlen (who was still in pursuit) deal one another mutual death blows in a lake house. The film's events and actions are grounded in a historical and geographical moment: the Midwest of the early 1930s. Hence, Road to Perdition is not a film about "fathers and sons" in the abstract. It is, rather, about these fathers and these sons. It is not merely "six weeks" on any road, but on these roads that connected large cities with smaller industrial towns and civic centers, [End Page 167] and which connected agricultural and industrial chains of production. It is a story about the Midwest during a time in which the agro-industrial expansion of the late nineteenth century was already contributing to a violent clash of capital, labor, mob, and federal interests. Produced seventy years after the Great Depression, Road to Perdition portrays a Midwest suffering from the ravages of an economic crisis even as the Midwest of the early millennium was suffering the effects of contemporary economic vicissitudes. Without drawing too neat of a schematic, Mendes's theatrical portrait of these fathers and sons subverts that which is unconstrained, without limit, and megalithic in favor of that which is modest in appetite, emplaced, and small. For example, the film juxtaposes Rock Island (and the small towns and cities which the Sullivans visit) with Chicago's hulking mass of metal and block. Such a filmic vision calls to mind Brian Page and Richard Walker's suggestion that when "exploring the spatial form of the Midwest, particular emphasis must be put on the neglected role of small industrial cities in the process of regional industrialization and the formation of a dense network of urban places."1 There is a reciprocal relationship of expansion between the historical powerhouses of industry such as Detroit, Chicago, or Cincinnati and the myriad farms, depots, and small cities positioned along the nodality of production. Such a system is at war with itself. Mob bosses like Al Capone and John Rooney need all the little banks in the small towns dotting the road from Rock Island to Perdition to increase their wealth without check or hindrance from the federal apparatus. But is it these small centers of commerce, precisely because they offer a degree of untraceability, that leave the mob open to the hemorrhaging blows dealt by the Sullivans, who are themselves untraceable...