This perspective - ultimately crucial to the story’s meaning - is lost in the film, which merely bookends its events with a few lines of banal, voiced-over narration from young Michael Jr. The graphic novel is told from the perspective of O’Sullivan’s son Michael Jr., now an adult looking back on the events of the winter of 1930 (’31 in the film), when he was twelve years old and on the run with his father. Yet somewhere along the way either Self or Mendes loses something critical: a point of view, a narrative or personal center to the story. Self also creates a recurring role for a fleeting but pivotal figure from Collins’s story whom the graphic novel allots only a few panels but who in the film becomes a full-fledged supporting character (played by a scene-stealing Jude Law). In adapting Collins’s story for film, screenwriter David Self ( Thirteen Days) makes several canny choices, among them the decision to expand the father-son motif by developing a quasi-generational bond between old Rooney and Sullivan, whom Rooney (cognizant of his own son Connor’s weaknesses) affectionately regards as the better son he never had. Their sons are the crime boss’s unreliable adult son Connor (Daniel Craig) and the hitman’s twelve-year-old boy Michael Junior (Tyler Hoechlin). The fathers are the Irish kingpin Looney and his chief enforcer, Michael O’Sullivan - or, as the film has it, John Rooney (Paul Newman) and Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks). The story centers on two fathers and two sons. Set in a period of Depression-era gangland legend, drawing on such historical figures as Al Capone, Eliot Ness, Capone lieutenant Frank Nitti, and Irish mob patriarch and Capone ally John Looney, Collins’s story takes the form of a father-son coming-of-age tale with shades of Kazuo Koike’s manga graphic novel Lone Wolf and Cub, which told a similar story set in feudal Japan.

I also discovered that the movie’s pervasive Catholic imagery was ripped from more integral themes of confession, forgiveness, and redemption that in the book are tied to a faith-affirming final revelation that provides a moral context for the whole story, but which is omitted from the film.

('Graphic novels' use comic-book storytelling for longer, and hopefully more substantial, stories than traditional comic books.) Immediately I understood why someone would want to film this story - and how the film had gone wrong. Dissatisfied after the screening, I went out and bought the original 1998 graphic novel, written by novelist and 'Dick Tracy' scribe Max Allan Collins and illustrated by comic-book artist Richard Piers Rayner ('Swamp Thing'), and read it in one sitting.

Road to perdition graphic novel