Will ‘Perdition’ Take Slow Road to the Oscars?

It’s dark. It’s violent. It’s character-driven. And it has Oscar possibilities galore.

On many levels, “Road to Perdition,” starring Tom Hanks playing against type as a mob hit man seeking revenge for the slaughter of his family, is the kind of movie Hollywood studios like to release in the fall, when kids are back in school and adult moviegoers are eager for something of substance to watch.

Yet DreamWorks is rolling out the gritty drama at the height of the summer popcorn season, when convention holds that audiences are interested only in broad comedies that require low brain wattage, a la “Scooby-Doo” and “Mr. Deeds,” or edge-of-your-seat sci-fi and action fare like “Minority Report” and “Men in Black II.”

“It’s something we put a lot of thought into,” said Richard D. Zanuck, who produced “Road to Perdition” with his son, Dean, and director Sam Mendes. “We all spun it around for some time months and months ago and became convinced that this would be a big time. There’s a point in the summer where audiences would have run their course with popcorn pictures.”

So the filmmakers and DreamWorks decided to forgo an opening during the year-end holiday season, when prestige dramas usually vie for Academy Award attention. Instead, they’re taking a path the studio followed with another R-rated Hanks film, “Saving Private Ryan,” which debuted in July 1998.

With the movie being released on only about 1,800 screens, Zanuck isn’t expecting “Road to Perdition” to be No. 1 at the box office this weekend, but he does hope the movie can build on critics’ reviews and word of mouth and ride the wave through the summer.

“Most dramas historically play well in 1,600 to 1,800 runs,” said DreamWorks distribution chief Jim Tharp. “Certainly with Tom Hanks you can add to that, but we think word of mouth will be good on the movie, and we will expand to smaller markets as word gets out.”

Throughout the country, critics were generally impressed. While many, like The Times’ film critic Kenneth Turan, hailed the film, especially its cinematography and stylish Depression-era production design, others found the movie difficult to embrace.

The New Yorker’s David Denby called it “perhaps the most thoroughly stylized gangster picture since the Coen brothers’ ‘Miller’s Crossing,’ ” but judged by the standard of “The Godfather” or even “Bugsy,” the film is “a stilted, self-conscious piece of work--a case of dark-toned academic classicism.”

Zanuck conceded that Sony’s sci-fi sequel “Men in Black II,” which had a record July 4 holiday opening last weekend ($52.1 million from Friday through Sunday), will remain a potent box-office force this weekend, even if ticket sales fall 50%.

“It’s not about numbers for us as much as longevity and getting the word out,” he said. “The Oscars is the last thing on our minds, but it would be a wonderful bonus.”

To be sure, Oscar voters, no matter what time of year, will certainly sit up and take notice of any film featuring Hanks, a two-time Academy Award winner for best actor, and co-starring screen legend Paul Newman, himself a previous best actor Oscar winner. But it’s still a roll of the dice.

“Conventional wisdom holds that summer movies don’t do well [at Academy Award time], that Oscar voters don’t have long memories and that you have to release your film in December,” said Tom O’Neil, author of “Movie Awards” and host of the awards Web site goldderby.com.

But O’Neil points out that “Gladiator,” which DreamWorks released in May 2000, and “Braveheart,” released by Paramount Pictures in May 1995, each captured Oscars for best picture. And DreamWorks also walked off with the Oscar for best picture with 1999’s dark suburban satire “American Beauty,” Mendes’ first film, which had a September release.

With “Road to Perdition,” O’Neil said, “DreamWorks is gambling that they can get out of the gate early, as they did with that other Sam Mendes movie, ‘American Beauty.’

“When ‘Saving Private Ryan’ lost to ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ DreamWorks executives were so miffed that they immediately scoured their other projects and saw this movie [“American Beauty”] by a rookie director [Mendes] that was on the shelf,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Let’s get behind this’ and they actually began their Oscar campaign in July, taking ads out in August, and then broke it out big at the Toronto Film Festival in September.”

That success demonstrated that a critically acclaimed film, nurtured with proper marketing and publicity, can gradually become a box-office blockbuster while losing none of its luster with academy voters months after its release.

Though there were reports that DreamWorks had wanted to release “Road to Perdition” last Christmas, Zanuck said “that was always a misconception.”

“There was some idle talk, but we never did sign off on it,” he said. “Certainly Sam Mendes didn’t sign off on it for the simple reason that it wouldn’t have been ready. Sam is a meticulous director and likes to spend a lot of time, all very valuable, putting a picture together. It was not something we wanted slapped together and rushed out for a release date. Quite frankly, he was still tinkering around with the picture six or seven weeks ago.”

Tharp said that by releasing the movie in July, the picture stands virtually alone among its genre, which can be a plus.

“It’s not only crowded at the end of the year,” Tharp said, noting that from late September through the holidays, weekends will be crammed with three or four studio releases, many in the same genre.

Some year-end movies already garnering Oscar buzz include Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt,” Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” and Rob Marshall’s musical “Chicago.”

“So we think we have a really good adult drama to be released in July, and maybe we’re the only movie that appeals to that audience,” Tharp said. “In the fall, you may have one or two of those movies coming out every weekend.”

Like “The Godfather” of three decades past, “Road to Perdition” combines violence, atmosphere, character and locale to paint a celluloid canvas of family devotion and destruction set against the backdrop of the Mafia.

Audiences will see Hanks as they’ve never seen him: a mob hit man who mows people down with a tommy gun, nearly rivals Pretty Boy Floyd as a bank robber and plots revenge against whoever killed his wife and one of his sons. Yet he also is a caring, if taciturn, family man trying to give his children some semblance of a normal life even while keeping his weapons locked up and hidden.

Newman plays the patriarch of an Irish mob family, whose loyalties are tested by his surrogate son, Hanks, and his real son, a truly bad apple played by Daniel Craig.

After vowing to take his revenge, Hanks’ character takes his surviving son and heads to the town of Perdition, where he hopes to hide his boy with a relative. But pursuing them is Jude Law, who plays a press photographer moonlighting as a hit man.

Tom Sherak, the former distribution chief at 20th Century Fox, said summer absolutely is the right time for a movie like “Road to Perdition.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Sherak said. “What am I going to see? I saw ‘Minority Report.’ I saw ‘Men in Black II.’ Now I want an adult movie. I want something I can think my way through. I want something that is not just popcorn. I need that. I’m a moviegoer.”

Sherak said that Oscar voters have longer memories than people think, recalling that “The Silence of the Lambs” opened in February 1991 and won best picture.

“As a studio, you have to believe in what you have,” he said. “If DreamWorks wants to bring back ‘Road to Perdition’ at the end of the year, they can. There are a lot of things they can do. If Tom Hanks or Paul Newman is in a movie, you think I’m going to forget about that when I go to vote?”

“Hanks is such a proven box-office draw that he is the insurance policy DreamWorks has,” O’Neil said. “This may be a dark, esoteric, Oscar-caliber movie, but it also has the box-office attraction of Tom Hanks.”