"Takin' a life or two
That's what the hell I do,
You don't like how I'm livin well fuck you!”
- N.W.A. ("Gangsta Gangsta")
The best scene in The Godfather isn’t when Jack Woltz finds that horse’s head in his bed, or when Sonny gets massacred, or the Baptism scene even. In my opinion, the best scene is when Michael Corleone kills Sollozzo and Capt. McCluskey. Here’s why: Al Pacino.
There’s a slow-zoom of his face right before he shoots both men where we see him internalize what he’s about to do. We know he’s been sent to kill them. We know he has a gun in his hand. But we’re still not sure if he can pull it off. After all, he’s not a gangster like his brothers and father; he’s a soldier, and a man of honour supposedly.
What we see in that scene is the transformation of a man into a sociopath, a soldier into a gangster, and it’s what singles out The Godfather from other classic gangster movies. We don’t normally see that kind of progression in a single scene, but The Godfather does it and does it very very well.
The gangster movie is one of the most popular genres in film because most of the men in these movies are just regular guys. They’re not evil, but they do bad things, largely for financial and personal gain. They’re usually family men, and they try to steer their children away from the life they chose. They hurt people sure, but it’s part of the job. People can relate to a guy that only wants what’s best for his family.
The above description can be ascribed to Tom Hanks’ character Michael Sullivan in Road To Perdition almost to a T. He’s bad in that he kills people for a living, but he doesn’t enjoy it. In fact, he seems to hate it. He works for John Rooney (Paul Newman), a bootlegger and kindly old man who puts family above business. He loves Sullivan like a son, but when his own son Conner kills Sullivan’s wife and youngest son, all bets are off.
The film deviates into a revenge film from that point, as Sullivan and his oldest boy go around robbing banks with ties to Rooney and his business partners (including Al Capone). But there’s something missing in this movie and in Hank’s performance in particular, that thing that makes other mobsters like Michael Corleone so compelling: danger.
We don’t fear Hanks the way we learn to fear Pacino. He’s out for revenge sure, but he doesn’t become a sociopath, despite his family’s murder. Ironically, his character is supposedly feared by everybody, the mob included. Every low level guy he goes after to intimidate into giving him information buckles at the sight of Hanks as soon as he enters the door. But why? He’s not scary. He doesn’t beat them or threaten their families. He just pulls his gun and everyone fesses up. In Casino, Pesci literally had to cave a man’s head in to get him to talk.
Is Hanks the problem, a man we’ve all declared the next Jimmy Stewart? That nice everyman we all root for? Perhaps. But I don’t fault Hanks for not being a very convincing gangster. I think he does the best he can with the material he’s given. I blame the script, which is too clean for this type of subject matter.
Gangsters aren’t supposed to be nice men. They’re self-interested and mean, motivated by greed and survival. They may be family men, but they’re not good people, let alone nice.
