It’s about Mike Sullivan, a hit man, and his son on the run from the consequences of Sullivan’s violent job.
On the filmmaking team, together with Sam Mendes who won an Oscar for his previous film – his first film – ‘American Beauty’, are Oscar winning Editor Jill Bilcock, also Oscar winning Production Designer Dennis Gassner, Oscar winning Costumer Designer Albert Wolsky (Gassner and Wolsky both won Oscars for their work on ‘Bugsy Malone’ in 1991), Oscar winning legendary Director of Photography Conrad L Hall, who made the great Western ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (1969). He won an Oscar for his cinematography on ‘American Beauty’ and won it for this film as well. It was a posthumous award as he sadly passed away in 2003, so his son collected the award for him.
Is there anyone on this team who HASN’T won an Oscar?? No wonder this film is such a piece of perfection…
The cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, with so much attention to detail on everything. Apparently about 100 types of artificial snow had been used (ok, probably more like 10, but that’s still loads!) Everything in the frame at whatever point in the film you pause it on, has been created and placed at that very place for effect. And gradually, as Mike Sullivan bonds with his son and becomes more ‘humane’, the season shifts from winter to spring, there is a colour shift, more light is brought into the film.
This film would’ve looked absolutely fantastic in black and white – though there was colour of course in 1931 Chicago, it was very minimal. Conrad Hall and the others on the team did their very best to make the film monochromatic – to “pull back as much colour as possible.”
Chicago, they have actually used as a film location. No doubt after days of location hunting, they found places where the touch of the 30s Depression remained, i.e. industrial sites no longer in use. We can really sense the rising industrial power, contrasting with the vastness of the American countryside, “where there was still space to completely lose yourself” in Mendes’ own words.
Let’s look at 2 out of the many exhilarating scenes in the film, firstly, when Mike Sullivan and Mike Sullivan Jr enter Chicago:
From a front-view shot of the 2 characters in the car, the camera dollies around along the side to show us the expression on Mike Sullivan Jr’s face as he looks up and is stunned, there are glimpses of the reflection of the skyscrapers on the car window which give us a taste of what he is looking at – the camera then reaches the behind of the car and lets it go, giving us full view of the vast city. The music ensures that it doesn’t over-do it.
Ok, that was short. Now a slightly longer clip. It’s a bit of a spoiler, so if you haven’t seen the film before but are interested in seeing it, perhaps best not to watch!
The fog, the lamp-posts, the rain, the umbrellas, the silhouettes, everything is so….sorry I can’t think of a more intelligent word – ‘cool’. There is no sound but the beautiful music by Thomas Newman (we’ll come back to him later, the awesomeness of the soundtrack deserves an entire separate paragraph), and the haunting sound, whatever instrument it is, confirms the end for Paul Newman’s character John Rooney. A gradual close-up onto his face, his expression says it all – his arm on the car, his back turned to Sullivan, the gun-shot firing in the centre of the frame, the men who fall one by one (the shots are unheard but the lights and smoke do its job), and the whole time, Paul Newman and his hopelessness takes centre frame.
I won’t say any more because all I’m doing is just describing what anyone can see for themselves, but the point I want to eventually lead up to is that, though it is a violent scene, it is at the same time so non-violent. The music and centre-framing of Paul Newman’s character ensures that the focus is not the falling men, but the still-standing Newman and his doom – it was going to happen all along. We truly sense the agony of Mike Sullivan in pulling the final triggers. Even in the first half of this scene when his physical body is not present, there is no glory as his gunshots bring all the men down one by one. There is despair, there is sadness, and it’s all very poignant.
So the violence is emphasised through the silence. Silence plays a key part in this film, for example, Tom Hanks’ acting conveys to us what he most feels and wants to say through what he does not say. We need to observe his expressions more than listen to his words, in order to understand him. Speaking of acting, all the actors are flawless in this film. Paul Newman does a great job – his Irish accent is perfect enough to fool me! Daniel Craig does an awesome job of playing Connor Rooney, John Rooney’s jealous (?) son, chuckling at Michael and his father playing the piano together – “it’s all so fucking hysterical!” The child who plays Michael Sullivan Jr, Tyler Hoechlin, has great presence and wisdom. My favourite though, is Jude Law’s sinister odd-ball Harlen Maguire. Everything about him is creepy – his job as a crime-scene photographer, his teeth, his fading hair, and, though this may sound strange, all of this makes him so…sexy. Hmm.
So, Thomas Newman. He’s never actually won an Oscar yet, correct? Ok, I may have salt-and-peppered my first paragraph with ‘Oscar’, but they really never get it right do they? He composed the soundtracks for ‘American Beauty’, ‘Shawshank Redemption’, and, well, I recently went to see ‘Adjustment Bureau’ at the cinema, came out saying wow I really liked the soundtrack, to which my boyfriend gave me a ‘wtf…you’re gonna comment on the soundtrack??’ look (he’s a really simple-minded person), came home, looked it up and found it was Thomas Newman. Aha! Explains it.
The Irish themed track, ‘Rock Island, 1931’ introduces us to the film in the opening credits and reoccurs several more times throughout the film. It’s a beautiful track:
Skip to 1:19 if you just want to just get to the music.
Great visuals, great sound, great cast, great story (it’s based on a comic-book, I just found that out today). The journey of father and son to ‘Perdition’, a “mythic place” of hope which “leads them on” and their bonding throughout the journey.
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