Different climates: 'Road to Perdition' & 'Sunshine State' - Screen

It's nice when two talented directors serve up films from opposite poles of inspiration, like Sam Mendes and John Sayles, whose current movies form this summer's referendum on what you want from cinematic art.

Road to Perdition, Mendes's study of Depression-era Irish mobsters in a small Midwestern city, features Paul Newman as John Rooney, the aging boss whose patina of gravitas can't hide his ruthlessness; Daniel Craig as his violent and wayward grown son, Connor; and Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, the orphan Rooney raised to become his trusted hit man and surrogate son. When Connor makes a brutal move against his nemesis, a series of lethal events ensues, and Sullivan and his own, twelve-year-old son must take to the road as fugitives.

Mendes, you'll recall, is the young English director whose first film, American Beauty, won him an Oscar. For Road to Perdition, he has brought along his brilliant cinematographer, Conrad L. Hall, and the new film is almost pathologically gorgeous. Every scene, every frame looks beautifully composed--whether the slow drip of ice packing a coffin at a wake, or a bobbing hatted multitude on the sidewalks of Chicago, or the wavery reflection of rain on a hotel room wall at night. The movie culminates in a silent, slow-motion nocturnal ballet of death staged on a rain-drenched city street, with a posse of mobsters machine-gunned down as residents gaze operatically from their windows. During the massacre, Newman keeps his back turned to the gunman, and not only is he somehow never hit, but as his men are mown down on all sides, he doesn't blink, doesn't even look. It's a whopper of a visual conceit. And what about those spectators at their windows? Wouldn't they be crouching in terror? Go with the lovely pictures in this movie, and you'll be fine. Start asking questions, and the thing unravels.

Road to Perdition is based on a graphic novel--a comic book--which may explain its drastically underwritten script. The theme of father-son struggle is announced, portentously ("Sons are put on the earth to trouble their fathers," Newman's Rooney growls), but never made to arise from the interactions of characters themselves. There's as little dialogue here as in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western (Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Sullivan's wife, has about thirty words to say), and as a result, the actors have to do extra work with their faces. Mostly they pull it off: Hanks with his fleshy, sorrowing potato-face, and Newman, his ageless blue eyes glaring out with a predatory serenity, conjuring something Shakespearean and damned. But there's only so much faces can do.

Steadfastly wintry and elegiac, Road to Perdition is all about mood, a dreamy visual poem that carries period-piece authenticity into a rapture of atmospherics. Instead of characterization, Mendes gives us sets and costumes, a world of dark Victorian interiors and heavy, three-piece woolen suits. Thomas Newman's score incorporates Irish themes into a plangent, throbbing symphony as relentlessly lavish as the film's look. With its speakeasies and machineguns, mobsters and molls, the scenario couldn't be more Edward G Robinson; but the mood is more like the New Age music of Enya--not hard-edged, but soft; a smooth and lulling fantasy.

Again and again Mendes and Hall make visual poetry out of violence, softening it. When Hanks's character becomes a one-man wrecking crew--you haven't seen this much death dealt out on behalf of a good man's family since Mel Gibson in The Patriot--there's plenty of blood, but the aestheticizing takes the horror out of the violence, making it safe. Ultimately the film's beauty sabotages its own moral inquiry, burying the question of goodness and evil set up nicely by casting an actor like Hanks against type as a ruthless professional killer, and turning the son's opening voice-over question--"some say Michael Sullivan was a decent man; some say he was no good at all"--into mere nostalgia. Road to Perdition is one of the most beautifully banal films you'll ever see--a cinematic mirage.

It's hard to imagine a filmmaker less like Mendes than John Sayles, whose Sunshine State serves up a sourly hilarious satire of contemporary Florida. In contrast to the fantasy stylizations of Mendes and Hall, Sayles rarely seems to care much about the look of his movies. There's an artlessness to many of them, an urgency about content and a corresponding impatience with form. With its abrupt cuts, minimal score, copious dialogue, and large ensemble cast, Sunshine State has an underproduced, semi-documentary feel. No poetry here, just the plentiful prose of a filmmaker with something to say.

Like Matewan, Sayles's 1987 chronicle of labor wars in a West Virginia mining town, Sunshine State offers a big chewy chunk of American social and political conflict. It's set in fictional Delrona Beach, where the Temple family, white motel owners, and the African American Stokeses, who live in a historically black section of modest beachfront homes, are beset by competing developers trying to pry, wheedle, or trick their owners into selling. A quartet of snowbird golfers, headed by Alan King, recurs throughout, waxing metaphysical about Florida as a developers' paradise. "Overnight, out of the muck and the mangroves, we created this!" they exult. "Golf courses--nature, on a leash!"

Sayles shows us characters peddling debased versions of history and culture put to the service of marketing. Like men in ties traipsing through the wetlands, touting their "village concept" of deluxe homes. Or the farce of Delrona Beach's "Buccaneer Days," with Mary Steenburgen in a delightful role as the addled chairwoman of the Chamber of Commerce promoting this dubious affair. Such programs, Sayles makes clear, form a kind of cultural and political revisionism, turning the gritty conflict of history into something that can be sold. "People don't realize how difficult it is to invent a tradition!" Steenburgen complains. Sunshine State explores how corruptible we are, not just brazenly, through shady payoffs (though these are here too), but in the more insidious accommodation of our imaginations to money-making, the theme-parking of our minds. In a bar, Timothy Hutton's character, a landscape architect working for the developers, describes his work to Marly Temple (Edie Falco of TV's The Sopranos) in terms of Frederick Law Olmstead's nineteenth-century visionary populism, only to bail out halfway through. "OK," he says, "the populist part of it has fallen away."

Sayles wears his own populism on his sleeve. His films distinguish themselves from more mainstream productions by their willingness to take us to local zoning meetings; and there as elsewhere, the confrontation of good and evil is rarely far from the surface. With its sprawling cast and stingingly funny ironies, Sunshine State bears some resemblance to a Robert Altman film, but Sayles lacks Altman's whimsy. He doesn't sufficiently enjoy the merry spectacle of cravenness and greed; he's more judgmental than Altman, and more didactic. Sayles doesn't mind turning his film into a history lesson, whether showing us a scrapbook of pictures from black debutante cotillions of a bygone era or simply reciting the brutal facts of Florida's economic past, its cotton plantations and turpentine camps and pulp mills, its planters, fugitives, and slaves. "You've got history to burn," enthuses Steenburgen's husband, fatuously praising her for her Buccaneer Days. "Yup," she sighs. "Mass murder, rape, and slavery."

Characters in Sayles's movies have a habit of fessing up like that, and there's nothing subtle about the points scored in Sunshine State, right down to developers speaking the language of war--huddling over maps while plotting to attack the "hostile native population" in the "soft underbelly of the island." The enemy is corporate America, busy bulldozing nature and authentic local culture, turning Florida--like everywhere else--into a place where even Mom's fried chicken turns out to be from KFC. Sayles's vision is one of ethnography determined by economy; his view of America is pessimistic and conspiratorial. "There's a handful of people who run the whole deal," says a former college football star and local hero hired to hoodwink the black owners out of their homes, "and then there's the rest of us."

Sayles began as a fiction writer, and like many of his movies, Sunshine State seems notably literary--packed with dialogue, visually plain, and driven by ideas in a way that makes it finally more thought-provoking than entirely satisfying as cinematic experience. I was grateful for some fine acting turns, especially Edie Falco who's terrific as the motel-owning Marly Temple, her toughness laced with dissatisfaction and desire. "I saw a manatee in here once," she drawls while out canoeing through the mangroves with Hutton. "Like a big old fat lady at the bath house. I felt guilty for watching." Sayles makes you wish for more lines like that--for characters speaking off the grid of politics and class, in a film you yourself might feel more guilty about watching this summer, and not quite so virtuous.

But for that there's always Austin Powers. Yeah, baby!

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