This one should be the “Road” not taken.
Depressing instead of insightful, overwrought instead of forthright, “Reservation Road” paves phony-baloney emotionalism into a promising dramatic scenario: What happens when the guy who secretly perpetrated the hit-and-run that killed your little son turns out to be a neighbor in your own lily white upper-middle class Connecticut community?
Author John Burnham Schwartz adapts his respected 1998 novel in a script he co-wrote with director Terry George (of “Hotel Rwanda” repute). Add to that a cast with names that the critics usually fawn over, including Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino. It should have meant a quality character-driven saga for grown-ups.
But the problems begin with the story which relies on a weak assumption as well as an improbable coincidence.
The weak assumption concerns the fact that Ruffalo’s character, Dwight Arno, is an attorney. So, despite the fact that he is also vaguely depicted as a screw-up by his ex-wife (Sorvino), it strains credulity that an individual versed in the law and in his social class would not only fail to stop when he accidentally struck a child but would also spend several days failing to turn himself in as the situation escalated. Dwight had to realize that it would go better for him if he just faced the music on the spot, especially since he was not driving drunk.
The implausible coincidence is that the dead boy’s father, Ethan Learner (Phoenix), happens to hire Dwight — of all people! — to represent him as his attorney to advance the investigation of the crime. Maybe all of this was better explained in the original book — as important subtitles often are in adaptations. But the movie glances over such detail, which leaves us with the performances on which to judge the piece.
Phoenix has been given a unrewarding one-note mission, to express the anger and thirst for vengeance that his character uses to substitute for heartache. There are no shades of gray to his pain. Worse still is Miss Connelly playing his wife, the grieving mother Grace. This “Beautiful Mind” star must be the most overrated person to ever have won an Academy Award. I’ve seen more moving expressions of woe on “All My Children.”
Ruffalo offers a tad more sophistication here, at least finding a way to make the Dwight character sympathetic even though he has done such an appallingly craven thing. But his work is not enough to prevent reservations about “Reservation.”
‘Reservation Road’
**
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly
Director: Terry George
Rated R for language and some disturbing images
Running time: 102 minutes
