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No, not the 1930s or the 1940s. I'm talking about the 1970s. In the Seventies, directors and cinematographers around the world outdid each other every year trying to create images of profound beauty. Director Bernardo Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro teamed up to make The Conformist in 1970, which was the most beautiful film ever made up till that time. In 1972, Ingmar Bergman and his photographer, Sven Nykvist, raised the bar with Cries and Whispers. In 1975, Stanley Kubrick literally invented new cameras and photo stock so that John Alcott could photograph by candlelight for Barry Lyndon. The aesthetic competition became fierce. Kubrick may have built cameras, but in 1978, Terence Malik and photographer Nestor Almendros spent more than a year making a tiny little flick called Days of Heaven because they were determined to film only during "magic hour" — that tiny bit of time after the sun goes down and yet there's still ambient light. During magic hour, no shadows are cast, and so it's unnecessary to use any kind of lighting. Their demented determination paid off: The pictorial beauty of Days of Heaven almost justifies the title, even though the film itself is one of the most boring you'll ever force yourself to sit through. There is something self-defeating about self-consciously beautiful movies. The moviemakers often sacrifice a certain measure of drama because they fall so deeply in love with the pristine images they're creating. There's an old Broadway adage about lavish musicals that don't work: "You can't hum the scenery." Sadly, the same is too often true about movies that are also great works of cinematography. But good looks don't make a movie automatically boring. Think of The Godfather, which literally made us all change the way we think about the past. You couldn't make a movie with a contemporary setting using the saturated colors and heavy blacks pioneered by photographer Gordon Willis in The Godfather, because that look immediately evokes a time 60 years ago. That's the power a movie with its own unique visual quality can have over our collective imaginations. 1982's Blade Runner is now our collective image of the future (it was photographed by Jordan Cronenweth) just as The Godfather is our collective image of the past. The glory days of cinematography ended with Hollywood's revolution in consciousness. Beauty became secondary to dazzling special effects. The passion for perfection was transmuted into a hunger to create the new great trick. The most successful motion-picture directors of the past 25 years are Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. And with a few exceptions (Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away), their movies don't look like much when there's not a lot of effects magic going on. These filmmakers are without peer when it comes to knowing where to put the camera at every moment, but they're willing to sacrifice pristine and painterly composition for other qualities. So it comes as a surprise that the staggeringly beautiful Road to Perdition comes out of Spielberg's camp. His studio, Dreamworks, co-produced Road to Perdition, and it was directed by his protégé, Sam Mendes. It comes as even more of a surprise that Road to Perdition is a collaboration between Mendes and an old pro of a cinematographer named Conrad Hall. They teamed up to make American Beauty, a stinker that was as drab visually as it was dramatically. Hall inexplicably won an Oscar for it, as did Mendes. (Actually, American Beauty inexplicably won a lot of Oscars in 2000, when it should have been burned at the stake instead. I hated American Beauty about as much as a person can hate a movie. I'll bet you NRO regulars did too, given that its villain is a retired military man who collects Nazi paraphernalia and beats his wife and son — all because he can't admit he's actually gay. You know who really loved American Beauty? Rod Dreher. I'm just telling you in case you want to send him e-mails about it.) Road to Perdition tells the story of a 12-year-old boy's discovery of his gangster father's murderous ways in the year 1931. The camera often stays somewhat low, to give us the sense that we're seeing things through the eyes of Michael Sullivan Jr. His father is an alienating and alienated presence, who refuses even to look his own son in the eye. The most chilling moment in the movie comes not when we see Michael Sr. (Tom Hanks) killing people, but when the father throws the son a bitterly cold "thank you" upon being informed that supper is ready. Like every other moment in the movie, this one comes at you photographically. Hall photographs the scene down a darkened hallway in which light reflects upwards from the shiny shellac on the wood floors. The setting and the look are key to conveying the utter lack of warmth between father and son. By contrast, a hugely enjoyable Paul Newman is always cast in a slightly golden light, drawing the audience to him just as his character draws in and seduces others. Newman's character, John Rooney, is the town mob boss, and he offers Sullivan's sons the only male affection they've ever known. Rooney did the same with their father when Sullivan Sr. was a boy. Rooney loved Michael Sr. and corrupted him at the same time, turning the boy into a killer. As the movie progresses into double-crosses and acts of revenge, Road to Perdition takes on the qualities of an epic. Father and son leave the nameless town ruled by Rooney and end up in Chicago — which we see down Michigan Avenue in a special-effects shot more dazzling and gasp-inducing than any moment in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of Hayden Christensen, The Worst Actor Who Ever Lived. If you like Road to Perdition, you'll call its pace stately. If it doesn't grab you, you'll call it slow. But even when it starts feeling as though it's crawling along, a simple image of a waitress bringing over a cup of coffee in a diner or a group of men reading the newspaper in a waiting area in Chicago's Union Station is enough to grab your eye and hold your interest. I was never really moved by Road to Perdition, largely because the movie's key performer is so opaque. The role of Michael Sullivan Jr., whose story this is, needed a genuinely great child actor. It needed Haley Joel Osment. But while Tyler Hoechlin is a beautiful camera subject, he can't quite convey the desperation, fear, yearning, and love that his character must feel for his father for the movie to work completely. Still, half a masterpiece is better than none, and Road to Perdition is half a masterpiece.
— Mr.
Podhoretz is a columnist for the New
York Post. |
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to Perdition is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Now, this
gangster-revenge picture starring Tom Hanks is far from lovely when you
consider its bloody and garish subject matter. And there's a lot that's
wrong with Road to Perdition. But the look of the thing
is so extraordinary that you just have to go see it. Every shot, every
camera angle, every frame in the course of its 119 minutes is ravishing
in a way movies are seldom ravishing any more. In this and in other ways,
Road to Perdition is a fascinating throwback to the glory days
of the American cinema. 
