Paul Newman @ 100: "Road to Perdition"
Thursday, January 30, 2025 at 10:30PM 
When was the first time you saw Paul Newman on the screen? It might be hard to remember for some, but I can pinpoint it exactly. It was a summer holiday in those early years of teenhood, when my parents liked to drive across the border into Southern Spain for the afternoon. I loved those day trips for many reasons, and one of them was this big store in town where they sold movies that I couldn't ever find in Portugal. They were cheap, too, the perfect fit for a young cinephile looking to spend his allowance. At the time, I was just starting to get into the Oscars, so I always looked for films I knew AMPAS had honored.
One of them was Road to Perdition.
When we got home, I remember waiting for nightfall to watch my new treasures in darkness. And then, there he was, Paul Newman. At the time, I was becoming aware of who he and many other Old Hollywood stars were, though I knew very little. Yet, there was a weight to my discovery of Newman. You see, my mom had pointed him out on the DVD case when she saw me with my new picture and waxed rhapsodic about the fellow who happened to be her favorite actor. She called him a legend, one of the most beautiful men she'd ever seen, his eyes piercing, intense, BLUE like nothing else in the world. She wasn't wrong…
I suppose there's something very right about a boy discovering Paul Newman through Road to Perdition. After all, the film is about a boy's gaze as he becomes aware of the reality he lives in, as he learns to look at the men in his life and see who they truly are. It's a film, partially about looking at Paul Newman and discovering the man hiding behind those warm grandfatherly eyes, so comforting one moment, so cold the next, holding the promise of salvation and death. It is the story of Michael Sullivan Jr., a twelve-year-old who witnessed his father's criminal dealings in the winter of 1931. The patriarch, Michael Sr., is a loyal vassal of the Irish mobster John Rooney, whom the older Sullivan regards as a parental figure.
His children, not just Michael Jr., certainly see the man as their grandfather in all but blood. We meet him during a wake, when the family comes to the Rooney's great estate to pay their respects to Finn McGovern, an associate of the organization whose brother just died. As shot by Conrad L. Hall in his final Oscar-winning feat, the whole affair is an icy procession of formalities, as bloodless as the embalmed corpse melting away in the corner. In some ways, the severity with which director Sam Mendes introduces us to the film's cosmos highlights and contrasts the bursts of brutality later on. It's difficult to imagine the savagery of those like Daniel Craig's Connor Ronney or Jude Law's psychopathic Harlen Maguire hitting quite as hard if their violence didn't feel so antithetical to the pristine form.
The whole world's a mausoleum and the camera moves with ceremonious precision, like it's part of a funeral procession even when depicting something as innocuous and joyful as a boy running free through the neighborhood. You feel the ice scratching its way through your veins, but then a gentle heat melts the crystals away. It's Paul Newman, ready to hug his pseudo-grandchildren and make the whole wake business somewhat bearable to the kids. He's a blinding sun within Road to Perdition's alabaster and bone midnight, full of life even as his age informs every movement and slow embrace, every flash of boyishness on an old man's visage.
This is why you get movie stars for your movie. Because they have a presence that's almost like a gravitational pull, reshaping the tonalities around them and asserting their dominion without the need to strain. That's not to say Newman is all sunshine as the Rooney patriarch. As early as this wake sequence, when the boy's idea of the man is still colored by unspoiled innocence, there's a sense of menace to him. You feel how everyone within those wood-paneled interiors cowers before him, their kingpin, afraid, maybe fearfully respectful, always deferential. Part of it is Newman's impact, part of it is Mendes' framing, part of it is how every actor reacts to him and how the audience projects their own feelings about the star unto the film.
As a kid, I didn't bring much baggage past a motherly recommendation, but I still felt the power – Rooney's and Newman's. Nowadays, I'm most struck by how performative he can be when entertaining the kids, and how still he becomes when the surviving McGovern brother starts making a fuss. Later, when John comes to the Sullivans' home after Jr.'s discovery, that waver between performative softness and recoil into stillness is even more pronounced. And just like the body, the eyes change. They were a pater familia's comfort before. Now, they bring forth a chilly portent, a lick of icy wind that cuts deep and promises terrible consequences to those who'd wrong him.
Somehow, he's more frightening then, acting the grandfather, than when demonstrably harsher. With his inner circle, Rooney is quick to reprimand Connor, who's really to blame for the bloodshed Jr' saw, slamming his fist on the table like the discontented father whose disappointment has long ago curdled into disgust, if not outright hatred. However, his voice never rises above a placid tone. It's the calm of his authority that drives home just how dangerous this grandpa can be, a monster hiding beneath the appearance of a gentleman. And since Newman is so striking, so effortless in delineating all of his character's darkness, he can underplay it later on, revealing the sadness of a devil whose heart is still human despite it all.
John Rooney doesn't want to destroy the Sullivans. They mean too much to him. He only calls for a slaughter when Connor forces his hand by attacking their house, killing the boy's mother and brother, setting the witness and his father on the run. Like Tom Hanks' Michael Sr., Newman's Rooney is someone who perpetrates incredible violence but never feels pleasure from it. Instead, he's wearisome. Even when hitting Connor and cursing the day he was born, Newman foregrounds the father's reluctance, how his fury stems from how the younger man's rashness has set forth a tragedy nothing and no one will be able to circumvent. It's a tired sort of rage, though not necessarily a show of remorse.
That's the greatest strength of Newman's performance, or, at least, what I most value about it in this Road to Perdition re-watch. It's the ambivalence the actor perpetuates even when the script demands a moral reckoning. It's how Rooney's Catholic guilt only goes so far. It's how a thespian takes a fairly simple text and hads to it, deepens the narrative. Even at his most putatively repentant, Newman holds on to a tenet of remove, a selfishness that tempers the emotions and distances himself from the viewer. Bizarrely enough, it's something he achieves through his movie star gravitas while, at the same time, constituting an inversion of the closeness such stardom usually suggests between the player and his audience.
Paul Newman starts the film by pulling us close. Then, he pushes us away. But not before whispering into our ears that, at the end of the day, we'll never know him or get close. Not Newman, per se, but John Rooney. Maybe both. His final scene is in the rain, looking death in the face, accepting it as an inevitability. Death wears the face of a man Rooney once thought a son, a man he betrayed, a man who's come to deliver justice. No absolution, just justice, bloody and terrible. Mendes was wise enough to gift us a close-up where those blue eyes get to express a galaxy of meaning. And among its many dimensions, there's a farewell. After all, Road to Perdition was Paul Newman's (and Conrad L. Hall's) cinematic swan song.
The Oscar winner would still make some TV projects and provide his voice for the first movie in the Cars franchise, a couple of worthy endeavors with none of the magnificence present here. For Road to Perdition marks the end with a nice final Oscar nomination to send the legend off. Yet, for me, it was the beginning. Even if unable to comprehend the entirety of who this movie star was, my young self was still fascinated by what he saw on screen, so lovingly filmed, so magnetic and prickly, sinister but irresistible. The rest of his nominated performances were next, then the unheralded triumphs, the little-known projects, the sound and fury of a movie star who'll forever live in our collective imagination. As long as people love cinema, Paul Newman shall never be forgotten. Because he was a man made for the screen, one of a kind. A century after his birth, that's as true as it ever was.
Paul Newman Centennial Tributes:
Reader Comments (2)
It was my Grandad who got me into Newman,he liked McQueen so we watched The Towering Inferno and I didn't much care for Steeve as a young lad just Newman's baby blues and the peak movie star goddessness of Faye.
As I got older I saw Butch and Sundance and his terrible disaster flick When Time Ran Out then as a teen Absence of Malice and The Colour of Money the as I became Oscar interested it was The Verdict and Hud and Nobody's Fool.
The more obscure projects like Sometimes A Great Notion,Harry and Son and Mr and Mrs Bridge which he's brilliant in
I actuaally think he should have won in 2002 for this role,it would have been a better win than the 86 win and if anyone deserved 2 Oscars it was Paul.
Lovely read Claudio.
I wish more people were engaging with this series,not even Nat has commented much.
Perhaps a Demi Moore retrospective would do the trick.
It's suddenly become cool to like her.