Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I’ve seen a dozen movies in the last week and a half and I have a few more coming up, so I wanted to get a move on the review process.
I’m starting with RESERVATION ROAD because that’s hitting this weekend.
I was intrigued from the beginning by the great cast under the helm of HOTEL RWANDA’s Terry George. You have people like Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino.
The trailer grabbed me right away. The tone seemed dour, thick with sorrow and tension and the movie delivered on that promise.
On one hand you have Ruffalo’s character, a down on his luck daddy. He’s divorced, he doesn’t have enough time to hang out with his kid and is doing everything he can to get more custody of his son.
On the other hand is Joaquin Phoenix who has a happy family life. He has two children that are happy, he’s got a beautiful, loving wife and a nice house.
Right away that serene calm is shattered as one of Phoenix’s children is run down in an accident. Ruffalo’s character hits the kid and at first stops. He knows it’s the right thing to do, but then he sees his own son who was sleeping soundly before the accident, and realizes that this will end his relationship with his son. Add on to that the basic guilt and fear associated in running over a small child and Ruffalo ends up running.
The movie focuses on obsession in all its different forms. Phoenix’s character becomes obsessed with finding his son’s killer. He stays up every night prowling the internet, looking up local laws on hit and run crimes and feeds his hate with other mourning parents on websites and chat groups.
In fact, he turns away from his surviving family in order to feed this hatred. His wife needs him. His daughter needs him and he acknowledges that on a surface level, but it’s not what you say, it’s what you do. His actions keep him away from his family both physically and emotionally.
Ruffalo’s character’s obsession comes in a slightly different form. He becomes obsessed with proving to his own son that he’s a good man. He doesn’t really explicitly say this, but that’s what I took away from the character, the aspect that really impressed me. Of course you expect him to be afraid of jail or afraid of being outed as a “child-killer” however unintentional the accident was.
There’s a strong movement in the film to oddly parallel Ruffulo and Phoenix. They are not so different and each one could have been in exact opposite situation. But Phoenix let’s his fear and turmoil feed hatred and Ruffalo, on some weird level, twists his fear of being discovered and his own guilt into a desperate bid to give his son the father he never had.
I’m a big fan of all the actors involved and they all do a good job with their work, although I have to say that Jennifer Connelly went over the top a few times. There’s a line of believability and I think she crossed it in a couple of her more extreme reactions. That doesn’t mean I think she’s a bad actress. I don’t think that. She’s even very good in this film, but there are moments that were so big they felt more like acting choices than real reaction.
I dug the flick, but it’s certainly not the kind of flick everybody will love. It wallows in a very depressing place for most of its length.
I had a chance to talk to director Terry George after I saw the flick, so keep an eye out for my interview with him a little later on today.
Got more in the pipe-line, too, including my thoughts on JUNO, CONTROL, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and John Landis’ documentary on Don Rickles called MR. WARMTH. And that’s not even all of ‘em, just the bigger ones! See ya’ soon with those!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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