![]() ![]() ![]() Yet the concluding remark must also be meant subtly to undermine the point of the rest of the movie. ![]() After all, the film takes its title from the supposed name of the town (Perdition-on-the-Lake it is, though not, oddly, a lake of fire) to which our two plucky Michael Sullivans try to flee in search of refuge from the Chicago mob in the 1930s. If you were to conclude from this that the movie suffers from a combination of portentous moralism and corniness, you would not be wrong. At the beginning, the question is left hanging by the end, when we know that the boy is Michael Sullivan’s son, also called Michael Sullivan, it is answered: “When people asked if Michael Sullivan was a decent man or had no good in him at all I give them the same answer: he was my father.” ![]() The voiceover asks the same question about one Michael Sullivan, whether he was a decent man or had no good in him at all. At the end of The Road to Perdition, directed by Sam ( American Beauty) Mendes and based on a “graphic novel” (that’s a comic book to most of us) by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, we see the same image we see at the beginning, before the opening credits: a boy in 1930s dress looking out to sea from a beach of some kind, his back turned to us. ![]()
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