Drama Hits a Bump in the Road

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The New York Sun

A lugubrious movie-of-the-week that wallows in a festering soup of guilt and revenge, “Reservation Road” should encourage several name-brand actors to rethink their taste in choosing projects.

Director Terry George (“Hotel Rwanda”) rounded up an A-list cast for this drama about death and retribution in suburban Connecticut. Joaquin Phoenix plays Ethan Learner, a college professor whose idyllic home life is destroyed in an instant. That instant arrives when an SUV driven by a harried father named Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), rushing to get his young son home to his ex-wife after a Boston Red Sox game, smacks into something on a dark, wooded road. The thump turns out to be Ethan’s son, who has paused by the side of the road to release some fireflies after a violin recital.

Dwight panics and speeds away, leaving a family to grieve and turning Mr. Phoenix’s doting dad into a man who obsesses himself into a vigilante state — determined to find the man who killed his son and deliver his own brand of justice. It doesn’t matter that Ethan’s wife (Jennifer Connelly, who here and elsewhere spends far too much on-screen time crying) has become utterly alienated, or that his grammar-school-aged daughter remains among the living. He’s lost patience with police efforts to find a suspect, and just as quickly he’s abandoning his sanity.

Dwight, a lawyer at an unglamorous legal office, undergoes a similar trauma. Written as a screw-up who blew his own shot at middle-American bliss, he’s torn by custody squabbles with his son’s mother (Mira Sorvino) and his increasing desperation over keeping his face out of the hit-and-run investigation. Unfortunately, since this is one of those movies that insists on throwing too many curves, the lawyer assigned to handle Ethan’s case is none other than Dwight.

Since “Reservation Road” is based on a best-selling novel, this is only the first of several plot turns that end up needlessly complicating the film’s narrative mechanics. It turns out Dwight’s ex-wife was the dead boy’s music teacher, a situation that might not feel contrived in a film less encumbered by the conventions of weighty literary adaptation.

The film might have found any of several more interesting or lively directions in which to go. Instead, it drags in psychodramatic monologues and male hysteria as the clues add up. Yet, amid much chewing of scenery and gnashing of teeth, it’s hard to put all the blame on the actors or their material. If Messrs. Ruffalo and Phoenix encountered a similar set of plot devices in an oversaturated John Woo film, they would glue you to the screen — before detonating it, of course. But no one would have to go to such extremes; they’d just have to locate more fruitful themes so audiences wouldn’t have to hash through the story’s monotonous tone and rhythms.

“Reservation Road” wants to show how catharsis and healing can carry people past the worst sorts of things they can imagine. Instead, it’s a feel-bad movie with no real payoff.


The New York Sun

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