Mark Ruffalo, left, and Joaquin Phoenix star in Reservation Road. (Macall Polay/Focus Features)
Like Babel, Reservation Road is another film for the Parents’ Worst Nightmare section at the video store: Joaquin Phoenix plays Ethan, a woolly professor who comes undone after his son is killed by a hit-and-run driver. When the police prove useless, Ethan enlists lawyer Dwight (Mark Ruffalo) to push back, oblivious to the man’s personal connection to the case. The film works best as a glimpse into the private tortures of two modern fathers: a good one who’s crippled by loss, a bad one on the edge of losing his son in a custody battle. The performances are uniformly excellent, but Ruffalo stands out as a study in male emotional corking — he looks like he’s about to pop his seams after a lifetime of keeping private agonies in check.
Yet director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) abandons these more unique themes of repressed and unleashed masculinity in favour of a formulaic cat-and-mouse game. Ethan is egged on by internet “help” groups overrun by vigilantes, until his sadness turns into full-on blood lust (really? This from a guy in Wallabies?). Ethan’s wife, Grace (Jennifer Connelly), watches her husband transformed, and of course you ache for any woman who loses a child to death, and then a husband to hate. But these are the easiest emotions for an audience to locate, and the script is too lumpen and unrealistic to do anything interesting with them.
One might be tempted to read deeper significance into Reservation Road: a study in American impotency in a time of violence? If only. Instead, this Road is washed out — all emotion, no destination.
Reservation Road screens at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13 and 14.
Katrina Onstad writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.
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