Reservation Road

Reservation Road addresses great complexities—death, grief, justice, revenge—but, as is now typical of prestige pictures, demeans them with stylistic and conceptual conventions. Based on a novel by John Burnham Schwartz and directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), Reservation Road’s gambit is its humanizing of a demonized figure: Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), the perpetrator of a hit-and-run accident in which Ethan and Grace Learner’s (Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly) young son is killed. Schwartz, who adapted his novel for the screen, stresses how the tables can easily turn in a situation like this: Ethan becomes bloodthirsty, out for the justice an inept police force won’t give him; Dwight, who cannot bring himself confess to his crime, becomes a panicky victim. The film, however, has these paradoxes stamped on its forehead: in an outrageous coincidence, Dwight, a lawyer, is assigned to the Learners’ case, and so must psychologically prosecute himself; the climax—followed by one of the year’s most brazen cop-out endings—pushes the film into hackneyed action-movie territory, an alienating blunder reminiscent of Todd Field’s like-minded In the Bedroom. Additionally, George’s tactics for giving us a sense of his characters’ dilemmas are largely TV-movie grade (Dwight’s guilt and Ethan’s anger, for instance, are represented through trite POV shots, during which the screen blurs and the sound echoes). Thankfully, Ruffalo stands out, giving Dwight a pathos and subtlety lacking in Phoenix and Connelly’s portrayals. Ruffalo shows us what Reservation Road could be—a quiet study of how bourgeois Americans are utterly unprepared for the realities of death and loss—rather than an overwrought, undercooked bid for Oscar gold. WAIT FOR THE DVD

Reservation Road is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).