Review

Review Date: 21-October-07
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Reservation Road (2007)

As Willow Rosenberg (of erstwhile "Buffy" fame) once noted, "Love makes you do the wacky." She was talking about romantic love, of course, but "Reservation Road" illustrates how paternal love can also send a man veering off the course of sanity. Just look at Dwight Arno, a divorced dad so worried about jeopardizing his visitation rights by being late that he does not stop after running over somebody with his car. Or look at Ethan Learner, the stricken father of the boy Dwight killed who neglects his family when they need him most because of an obsession with revenge. These are men who would do anything for their sons. Anything except what is most sensible and right, which is often the hardest thing to do.

These are also men I would not care about were they not portrayed by Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix. "Reservation Road" was adapted from a novel by its writer, John Burnham Schwartz, and director Terry George, and I suspect this is another example of depth not making it to the screen. The leading men are talented and perfectly cast: the bearded, enigma-eyed Phoenix suggesting a volcano of rage behind Ethan's professorial demeanor; the childlike, apologetic-looking Ruffalo invoking recognition as a lost soul instead of a monster. (He's a lawyer and by rights a shark.) Yet Ethan is as remote from the viewer as he is from his family, and Dwight's behavior is hard to comprehend even accounting for fear. The movie concerns how the characters reacted when one took a life by accident and the other lost his son to a missing stranger. It fails to uncover emotions or motivations beyond what the average person would assume to be involved in such situations, and merely confirming them doesn't warrant the price of admission.

The plot does go beyond the assumption of probability, however. This road winds around upon itself until the characters are all tangled up, with Ethan hiring Dwight to oversee the case and sending his little daughter (Elle Fanning) to take piano lessons with Dwight's ex (Mira Sorvino). (Back at home, Ethan stokes his pain in Internet chatrooms and frightens wife Jennifer Connelly, whose Academy Award for playing a suffering spouse seems to have pigeonholed her.) Dwight wants to turn himself in, if only to set a proper example for his own son (Eddie Alderson), but fate thwarts his good intentions with bad timing and misunderstandings. What I want to know is, are we supposed to accept the story's coincidences as coincidences (ooh, drama), or did the book intend them as supernatural signs, in Dwight's eyes or the reader's, that the truth is inescapable and requires fortitude? Is that a lesson both men needed to learn? Me, I already knew that, and that life sometimes hurts, and that love makes you do the wacky. "Reservation Road" did not take me anywhere new.

Copyright © 2007 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.