A Road Paved in Gray

Two years ago, a movie with a distinctly ambivalent central character was the unlikely winner of the Academy Award for best picture.

Was “American Beauty’s” Lester Burnham, the character played by Kevin Spacey, a downtrodden suburban hero, wearied by the shallowness of his materialistic surroundings, or a sleazy, sardonic creep with an unhealthy interest in a girlfriend of his teenage daughter?

Director Sam Mendes, in his first movie, kept audiences intrigued by such questions and did so with style. But he must now surmount a familiar obstacle: his sophomore film.

At first glance, Mendes’ “The Road to Perdition,” which is scheduled to open in July, could hardly be more different from the contemporary suburban affluence in which “American Beauty” is set. It takes place in Chicago and the Midwest in the Depression era of the 1930s.

But its story revolves around a character of moral complexity to rival Lester Burnham’s: Michael Sullivan, a hit man who sets out with his young son on a journey of revenge after members of his family are murdered.

In his office at the Donmar Warehouse, the small London theater he has run with remarkable success for the past 10 years, Mendes discussed his attraction to morally ambivalent lead characters. “[Michael Sullivan] is not a good-hearted hit man,” he said flatly. “He’s a hit man. He’s done bad things and also necessary things. He doesn’t explain his actions. As with Kevin Spacey’s role in ‘American Beauty,’ the audience is asked to judge whether at any given time this man is doing good or bad. The film flirts with audience’s sympathies in that way. It has no moral absolutes--which is what drew me to the script.”

Mendes has himself added to the sense of paradox about this dubious central character. “When I read the script, I said I’d like to pursue it, but I also wanted someone you would never expect to play [Sullivan],” he said. “Because it’s much more interesting to cast against type.”

They don’t come much more against type than Tom Hanks, the nearest thing to an all-around stand-up guy that American movies have produced since the days of James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Hanks is best known for playing essentially decent, even heroic characters, but he leaped at the chance to portray Sullivan, even though he had wanted a long break from filming after the grueling experience of shooting “Cast Away.”

“You can’t be a slave to the familiarity that the audience has with you,” Hanks said, speaking by telephone. “I’m familiar to people, but I think you have to do something to expand the horizons of that familiarity. You can’t escape the fact that people know you and have preconceived notions of you, but you have to try and take people places with you they’ve never been to before. It’s a hard thing to do.”

Judging by a two-minute trailer for “The Road to Perdition,” it’s clear that Hanks’ character is no angel. “This isn’t like Tony Soprano’s family, trying to deal with the ethics of whether it’s bad or OK to kill someone,” Mendes observed. “[In ‘Perdition’] that deal was done years ago.”

The other strong narrative strand in “The Road to Perdition” is the uneasy relationship between Sullivan and his son, Michael Jr., (played by Tyler Hoechlin), who accompanies him on his vengeful mission. “What isn’t clear at first in the story is how much the boy knows about how his father makes his living,” Mendes said, “and then what happens when he finds out.

“In part, this story is about the secret world your parents inhabit that you don’t have access to. This boy gets access before he’s ready, so then it’s about how children have to deal with violence, and whether the seeing and watching of violence leads you to become violent yourself. Ultimately, it’s about a father saving his son from his own fate.”

Hanks, 45, said he too was intrigued by the story’s father-son motif. “As can happen with small dysfunctional families, where a lot of things aren’t said, one son can be the apple of the father’s eye,” he noted. “And in this story, there’s a developing relationship between the father and son, and you wonder what will happen.”

Hanks noted that “Perdition” also features a subtler, surrogate father-son relationship, between his character and that of his mob boss, played by Paul Newman. Mendes described Newman’s character as initially benevolent but increasingly sinister.

The film came about after DreamWorks, the studio behind “American Beauty,” sent Mendes a script written by David Self (“Thirteen Days”). Self had adapted it from a graphic novel by Max Allen Collins.

“It’s a comic book,” Mendes said, laughing. “I can’t bring myself to say ‘graphic novel.’ But it’s a serious story. The script is loosely based on it. The film took a swift diversion from the source material the minute I got hold of it. And the script needed to be pared down to its essence. A lot of what I saw in it had the same kind of nonverbal simplicity of art-house pulp movies like ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.’ The story isn’t just about what’s said.”

Hanks said the script was toned down considerably from its source material: “The graphic novel was much more pulpy. They call [Sullivan] ‘The Angel,’ and he strikes fear into everybody. In the movie, he is still an enforcer, but his notoriety is soft-pedaled.”

Mendes, 36, had expected a long break from movies in the wake of “American Beauty.” He returned to work at the Donmar Warehouse not actively looking for film projects and started work directing a play called “To the Green Fields Beyond.” (He recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of the Donmar in November, although he will retain an office there.)

It was when he was in rehearsals with the play that he agreed to direct Perdition. This was exactly a year after the September 1999 release of “American Beauty.” But once the play was complete, the film had to be shot in quick time, to be completed before last year’s planned writers’ strike.

The production base for “Perdition” was Chicago, but because Mendes wanted an authentic sense of time and place and as little computer-generated imagery as possible, shooting was spread out across far-flung Midwest locations. Much of the action in the story centers on the Quad Cities region of Illinois and Iowa (The “perdition” of the title refers not only to damnation and the loss of one’s soul, it is also the name of a fictitious small town in Michigan that plays a crucial part in the father and son’s journey.)

It’s likely that “The Road to Perdition” will be one of the year’s most hotly discussed films because of the moral ambivalence at its core: a guy in a murderous profession who’s nevertheless trying his best to be a responsible father. It’s these shades of gray that Mendes and Hanks have seized upon most eagerly.

“It’s odd to be making films in the Hollywood mainstream that aren’t dealing in black-and-white issues,” Mendes noted. “First ‘American Beauty,’ now this.”

As a director, Mendes has made his reputation on closely studying texts and working to reach their emotional core, first with a Donmar revival of Stephen Sondheim’s controversial musical “Assassins,” later with “Cabaret” and “The Blue Room,” starring Nicole Kidman. Of “American Beauty,” he has said, “I thought I was making a much more whimsical, comic story, kaleidoscopic, almost like a Coen brothers movie--’The Big Lebowski,’ for example. And in the cutting room I found I was instinctively drawn towards a much more emotional story.”

Hanks is even more bullish than Mendes about the absence of black-and-white figures in “Perdition.”

“I think the film has a ring of authenticity to it. It’s a genre movie, by and large, with all the signposts you’d expect: There’s bootlegging, it’s set in the Depression era. But it avoids the standard narratives. It looks at gray areas. There’s a substantial amount of paradox in the story.

“It stays within the confines of an expensive, mainstream studio picture, but Sam is a renegade,” Hanks continues. “He has a bit of the anarchist in him. With him directing, you get not to do the standard things.”

In fact, Hanks believes the good-bad dichotomy at the heart of “Perdition” is what underpins the story: “Otherwise, it’s just about the retribution of a bad guy planning revenge. Without that ambivalence, you’re just dealing with the primary colors of movie-making. When you’re trying to hold a mirror up to nature, deep down the audience knows that people sometimes get away with evil.

“At times, movies can be like a standard morality play, a bracing tonic. But there are also times when the audience is dying for another view, about the paradox of being alive.”

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David Gritten is a London-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Sunday Calendar.