Paul Newman was and wasn’t the nicest of men
My favorite Paul Newman performance is his final on-screen one, as mob boss John Rooney in Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition. It’s a good, not great, film, which is a disappointment given its phenomenal cast and to-die-for Conrad Hall cinematography. But there’s something unique in Newman’s contained performance as a man of infinite complexity, someone as comfortable playing a piano duet with his surrogate son as breathing portentously of his profession, "This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see heaven.
