GOING GREAT GUNS TOM HANKS PLAYS A HIT MAN IN 'ROAD TO PERDITION,' HIS LATEST FILM IN A DIVERSE CAREER.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

TOM HANKS wants us to believe he's a really bad guy.

Good thing he can act.

As you've probably heard, the beloved, back-to-back Academy Award-winner essays a professional killer in his latest movie, the 1930s gangster drama ``Road to Perdition.'' Michael Sullivan is the closest thing to a villain that Hanks has ever played. Indeed, the only guy in the actors' canon even remotely as nasty was the egomaniacal, um, stand-up comedian in ``Punchline.'' Even when Hanks has taken lives on screen before, in ``Saving Private Ryan'' or ``The Green Mile,'' it's been in service of the state and as sympathetically as humanly possible.

But cold-blooded as Sullivan is, he's not all bad. In fact, by the end of the movie, which was adapted from Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's graphic novel and directed by ``American Beauty'' Oscar winner Sam Mendes, he turns into a pretty good father to his surviving son, Michael Jr. (14-year-old Tyler Hoechlin).

This, of course, after teaching the kid a crash course in criminal survival while pursuing a bloody vendetta against his former boss (Paul Newman), whose own violent son (Daniel Craig) killed the rest of Sullivan's family.

OK, not the best role-modeling the world has ever seen. But with Tom Hanks playing him, Sullivan can't help but seem, at the very least, well-intentioned.

Don't tell Hanks that, though.

Junior partner

``I can't imagine that he's a good dad,'' says Hanks, who turns 46 on Tuesday. ``I mean, that house they live in is so dark and so depressive and there's no conversation. It's not like he comes home and plays ball with the kids then helps them with the homework and reads them a story before they go to bed. He's not exactly the benevolent father figure.

``But OK, all right; without question, there are a number of paradoxes as to why he does what he wants to do,'' the father of four grudgingly admits. ``And when he does put it together that he actually has this offspring who cares for him somehow, he comes around. But what's interesting is that it never comes out of his own awareness. It comes from necessity; he needs this kid to drive the car. So because of that, he has to be a little bit more patient, and it's probably the first time in his son's life that he's actually engaged him in a father-and-son instructional kind of manner.''

The right role

For many years, it has been assumed that Hanks avoided playing unsympathetic characters in order to maintain his lucrative, likable, Jimmy- Stewart-of-his-generation image - by people who'd forgotten just how disturbing Stewart got in those Alfred Hitchcock thrillers and Anthony Mann westerns, anyway. But Hanks has always maintained that when the right role came along, he would not hesitate to expose his dark side.

``When I understand the motivations of why he is a bad guy,'' he reiterates. ``The vast majority of these types of roles as they come down the pike are just antagonists for the sake of the protagonist role. A bad guy, to me, is somebody like Fred MacMurray in 'The Apartment.' I would lunge to go off and play that type of role. Do they exist anymore? I haven't seen 'em.

``In this case, we have somebody who's doing extremely bad things for extremely bad reasons, and at the end of the movie he does extremely bad things for good reasons. To me, there is no delineation between bad guy and good guy. There is a definitive rationale to the part that I discern and then follow through on. And if somebody else is either satisfied or dissatisfied by the choice, I simply don't care.''

Tough talk. But how much of it is just talk? According to collaborators, Hanks is as much of a stranger to movie-star arrogance as he is to box- office failure.

``He has the quality of not dodging things, which is as true off screen as on screen,'' acting legend Newman says of his equally respected co-star. ``There's no fancy footwork, there's no approaching things sideways, and what you're looking at is what you get. And that's refreshing.''

``They so don't behave like movie stars,'' director Mendes says of both Hanks and Newman.

``They don't stomp around or stay in their trailers. And neither of them has an entourage - you don't know how rare that is. They don't spend their time on cell phones, they don't dis the crew, they don't burst into tears. They just want to act, they don't play at being movie stars. I suppose, when you're that big and that successful, in a way it relaxes you because you've gotten there. I think the people who haven't got there are usually the most tormented.''

Being there has its privileges, of course, and Hanks exercises them in choosing the best projects the film industry has to offer.

After his still-laughable Hollywood start on the drag sitcom ``Bosom Buddies'' and a hit (``Splash,'' ``Big'') or miss (``Joe Versus the Volcano,'' ``The Bonfire of the Vanities,'' ``Turner & Hooch'') first decade in films, the Bay Area native is still enjoying a run of blockbusters that began in the early '90s with ``A League of Their Own'' and has continued through ``Sleepless in Seattle,'' his Oscar winners ``Philadelphia'' and ``Forrest Gump,'' ``Apollo 13,'' the two ``Toy Story'' animated features, ``Private Ryan,'' ``You've Got Mail,'' ``Green Mile'' and ``Cast Away.''

His next film, the holiday release ``Catch Me If You Can,'' reteams Hanks with ``Ryan'' director Steven Spielberg and co-stars ``Titanic's'' Leonardo DiCaprio. Movie specs simply do not get any better than that.

It's about priorities

``No, there's plenty of stuff out there,'' Hanks replies when asked if it's becoming difficult to find new projects the caliber of his previous triumphs. ``It's harder to work yourself up for the long haul of it. Part of it is, look, I'm still very much in my child-rearing years, and it takes an awful lot out of you. I've learned a lot and gone through quite a bit and have been able to explore huge themes in 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Apollo 13' and 'Cast Away' and such. Those were really big emotional and long events that took up a lot of my mental capacity in order to do. They don't come along every day, but I'm still completely satisfied with the options that I get to ponder.''

With its hushed approach to mob movie excess and overriding Oedipal concerns, ``Perdition'' offered both exciting challenges and an unusual kind of strain.

``Certainly, an attraction was that it's a bit of a genre-busting movie,'' Hanks says. ``It has all of the stuff that you're going to expect from a 1930s Prohibition what-have-you. But then it's completely void of the iconographic, standard storytelling points or graphic elements that usually go with that. That stuff has become fodder for variety-show satire sketches for an awful long time.

``The question was, can the movie still be involving without any of that stuff in it. It's just about what the grander story is, and when you come into the realm of fathers and sons, that's thorny if it's just about one father and son. But when you add all the other elements that go into this, it's a very complicated emotional journey that everybody goes on. And that's the stuff that ends up being much more meaty than the external elements of the rain and the hats and the guns and the cars.''

So much for the easy part.

``It's a very muted movie,'' Hanks notes. ``We had a two-week rehearsal period in which we just tried to decipher what needed to be said and what could be manifest in some other way. It's not a challenge, it's actually fun, but it's a very prolonged thing that you have to do. It's luxurious in that there was not a lot of verbiage - We kept asking ourselves, 'Do we really have to say this? How can we trim this down so that it's even more spare?' That just takes a very long time, and it wears you down after awhile. The continuous closeness-to-the-vest with which we had to rein in everything created a different brand of exhaustion.''

The result is a different kind of gangster drama starring as different a Tom Hanks as we may ever be likely to see. Now the question is whether the star's vast audience will accept the new terms.

``I think there is a knee-jerk reaction just due to the fact that it is the type of movie that it is,'' he says of such speculation. ``But I don't understand why it's so important for anybody to play a certain type of role. But here it is, and there are reasons behind it. Marketing concerns do not take into account the fact that the movie establishes its authenticity in its first two nanoseconds. You either buy it or you don't, it's truthful or it's not. I don't think it's a matter of whether you're gonna buy somebody in a role or not.

``An awful lot of things go into the releasing of a movie now,'' Hanks acknowledges. ``It's all, like, awareness this and that and whatever. But I liked the way that, for example, Sony would do it when they were coming out with all of those great electronics products. They didn't have market testing because they were making things that the populace didn't even know they wanted. Why would you make Walkmans when people already have portable tape players? But people flocked to it.

``Likewise, hopefully, movies will always present to audiences something they've never seen before. That is a precious commodity in any industry. 'But do you think the audience is actually going to buy something they've never seen before?' '' he adds in a Nervous Nellie marketer's voice. ``They do it over and over and over again.''

CAPTION(S):

7 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) TOM HANKS, DARKLY

Big screen's likable Everyman dares to take the `Road to Perdition'

(2 -- 4) Taking the ``Road to Perdition'': Paul Newman, above left, and Tom Hanks; Jude Law, right; and Hanks and Tyler Hoechlin, below.

(5 -- 7) Jennifer Jason Leigh, above, plays Tom Hanks' wife; Jude Law, right, is a hired gun known as ``The Reporter''; and Hanks, below, portrays a killer who must care for his son.