Graphic, Novel

In a small scene from the misguided Joe Versus the Volcano, Tom Hanks emerges from a doctor's office wearing a fedora too small for his head and a trench coat that hangs off his body as though dangling from a skeleton. Hanks, then in his early 30s, still looked like a child. Twelve years on, he sports the same wardrobe throughout much of Road to Perdition, but now the clothes fit. In his mid-40s, Hanks suddenly seems much older beneath beard stubble and added weight, a layer of grime and guilt. He has gravity, and his body appears to sag.

Hanks plays Michael Sullivan, loyal lieutenant to 1930s Midwest mobster John Rooney (Paul Newman, eerily immortal). Sullivan kills without question, firing his gun with neither grin nor grimace. Murdering other gangsters is just his way of keeping his family clothed, fed and housed. His two boys, Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) and Peter (Liam Aiken), say their father goes "on missions" for Mr. Rooney -- but Sullivan and his wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) know there's nothing romantic about being a gun for hire. Hanks, mute for much of the film's first third, looks like a ghost -- pale and dead-eyed.

It's only when Sullivan is confronted with the consequences of his actions that he springs to life. Michael Jr. sneaks into his dad's car and watches his father and Mr. Rooney's son, Connor (Daniel Craig, all heavy-lidded doom), gun down a onetime friend. Connor wants to off the kid, but Sullivan vows he won't talk. His word isn't good enough, and Connor sets in motion events that force Sullivan and son to hit the road seeking vengeance. Turned out by Al Capone's right-hand man, Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci, class and sleaze), they become bank robbers, partners and, at last, family -- "gun and son," as creator Max Allan Collins once wanted to call them.

This remarkable movie's roots grow from a dozen different directions: the gangster films of the 1930s; comic books (it's based on a 1998 graphic novel written by Collins and richly illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner); Kenji Misumi's 1970s Lone Wolf and Cubfilms (father-and-son samurai movies that likewise sprang from Japanese comics); the television and big-screen versions of The Untouchables; Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde; and the yellowed newspaper clips about gangsters that informed Collins' previous works as crime novelist, comic-book creator and moviemaker. (He took over the Dick Tracynewspaper strip in 1977, after Chester Gould stepped down.)

Collins and Rayner's comic book is a violent read, its story buried beneath the rat-a-tat-tat of tommy guns and the spilling of so much blood that the pages would drip red were they in color. Director Sam Mendes and screenwriter David Self's more poetic version is elegiac, a lush painting forged from sketches. The movie looks magnificent. Mendes, who squeezed the last bit of symbolism out of suburbia's trappings in American Beauty, lets cinematographer Conrad Hall's gritty visuals fill in the details. White Midwestern snow gives way to the gleaming spires of Chicago and the dusty roads and rain-drenched streets that lead nowhere.

Self has added a vile assassin not found in the book: Maguire (Jude Law), a crime photographer who shoots his subjects well before he loads the film. Law, his whole body reeking of rot, is Sullivan without the guilt or the rationale -- a man who kills for thrills.

It's tempting to celebrate Road to Perditionfor being a smart, emotional film released during the season of the stupid and sunburned. But this movie would be worth feting in any season. It's wrenching but never manipulative, stoic but never dull, exhausting but never wearying. Road to Perditionstrikes a haunting note: Fathers and sons can also become, for better or worse, blood brothers.