Film studies: Sam Mendes, his baby and his bathwater

When Road to Perdition opened in the US earlier this year, it received very mixed reviews. I don't mean to fight that battle again. I didn't like Sam Mendes's second movie, though I remain an admirer of American Beauty and someone who reckons Mendes will come through again. But there's no reason for him to be ashamed of the literary values he has encountered in the theatre, or to discard them when approaching the big screen. The trouble here could be precisely because Mendes hoped to let his past go, to make something that was unequivocally "a movie".

One might be tempted to think of Road to Perdition as the ultimate gangster film, reaching from the depths of ordinary family life in some small mid-West city up to the levels of Frank Nitti and Al Capone. Mendes, I daresay, grew up on and then grew above the great gangster pictures, and may have been tempted to have his go at it. As Francis Coppola observed on The Godfather, everyone gets a kick out of the gunplay scenes, the jagged bursts of fire, the bodies tumbling.

Maybe someone should then create a weekend getaway for young actors and directors when they can get the blood out of their systems – without going to the length of whole movies. I'm sure Mr Mendes learned early on in the theatre that he needed to know and understand his characters as living beings, if he was to bring them to life. He proved that with his treatment of the Kevin Spacey/Annette Bening characters in American Beauty. But I doubt Mendes knows many gangsters, let alone their drama and dreams. He knows gangster movies, their stereotypes and the habitual dialectic of their tricky lives.

Now Coppola had an advantage on The Godfather – not that the film was closely attended by real gangsters. More than that, Coppola came from an Italian family, and he was dramatist and writer enough to recognise a story about family in which the famous weakling or goody-goody demonstrates that he can be darker than all his brothers. (This was not a million miles from the psychological history of Francis himself in the Coppola family, for he had grown up under the shadow of a more brilliant older brother.) The real failure in Road to Perdition is the central character, Michael Sullivan (played by Tom Hanks). The film does best of all where Mendes's iconic respect for stereotypes is least tested. Paul Newman's elderly rascal is excellent: the man is rotten, and affable – that's all you need to know. I'm sure Newman got that in an instant, and he is smart enough now as an actor to know that he doesn't have to do much more than stand there and scowl.

The problem really comes with the Hanks character. In theory, Hanks has been all his life not just a surrogate son to Newman, but his most reliable operator. Hanks has murdered many people at Newman's orders. We do not see one such job; and we never get a glimpse of the brutality in Sullivan's soul. Indeed, as he presides over his family (a wife and two sons), he is presented rather as the admirable and still lovely older sister who has had to be a prostitute for 10 years or so to provide for the family, but who has not really been altered.

Whereas, of course, 10 years of anything colours us. The great achievement of American Beauty was in showing what that marriage has done to Spacey and Bening – and in showing us the tattered remains of the younger selves they try to remember. This is beyond Hanks, and it may have offended his urge to seem decent that he might be seen killing anyone for hire (as opposed to protecting his family).

The begging drama of Road to Perdition is of a callous man shaken out of that state and compelled to realise that his son's soul may be at stake.

The film goes through the motions of that parable, but never feels it. I'll go further: the premise is rigged. When the older boy witnesses a mob killing, it is proposed that he must be eliminated in case he talks. That is as daft as the notion, years ago, in On the Waterfront, that the Rod Steiger character – the brains of the gang – must kill his brother, Marlon Brando, to stop him talking. On the real waterfront, Steiger would never have been so embarrassed or exposed. And in real Chicago the kid's inadvertent witnessing of murder would have turned into initiation – for no Newman character would be ready to lose the services of Hanks.

But sometimes when directors confront great movie genres they abandon common sense and everything they've learned about drama.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk