Filmmaker Terry George moves from an African tragedy (Hotel Rwanda) to an American tragedy with his docile Reservation Road. Adapted from John Burnham Schwartz’s novel by George and Schwartz, the movie tells of a hit-and-run accident that becomes the catalyst for a study of grief and anxiety in two American families.
The film opens as Ethan Lerner (Joaquin Phoenix) and his wife Grace (Jennifer Connelly) watch their son Josh play cello in the school orchestra on a breezy autumn evening. At the same time, Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) and his son Lucas are enjoying a hot dog and a Boston Red Sox baseball game in overtime. But his team’s success doesn’t alleviate Dwight’s worry about getting Lucas back to his mother (Mira Sorvino) on time. While speeding home, Dwight accidentally swerves, hits and kills Josh as the boy is letting fireflies go outside a gas station. Dwight runs.
Through AIM, Google, and grief blogs, Ethan submerges himself in the world of mourning parents, exchanging stories of police negligence and his own inability to cope. Groups like Mothers Against Drunken Driving (MADD) and chat rooms for survivors and victims replace Ethan’s family as a way of coping. Meanwhile, Dwight silently ruminates on whether and when he should turn himself in, while, in the film’s ‘clever’ twist, Ethan retains Dwight’s law firm to help with the investigation.
Shot with a tired eye by cinematographer John Lindley (Pleasantville), Reservation Road looks and sounds tragic but hardly has the chops to feel tragic. Director George plays every moment you would expect for maximum mediocrity: the recovering mother yelling at her grieving husband, the inability of the police department to do anything, and the preposterous moment when Ethan keys into Dwight’s guilt. The shots of the idyllic Connecticut suburb seem to be lifted from every other American white-collar tale of woe and infidelity right down to the opening shot of a pristine marina. No kidding: Even Phoenix’s beard looks like it was bought off a mail-order catalogue.
The actors try their best to wade through the banality with some sense of nuance even when the script’s tone is overwrought. Phoenix’s wrathful intellectual is most effective in moments of subdued tension: an awkward comment in his media and society class at an unnamed college, the roadside photographing of a dented car. Meanwhile, Ruffalo consummately keeps up wounded pride, an emotion he has seemingly mastered at least on the exterior. And one can only hope that Elle Fanning, who plays Ethan’s daughter, doesn’t become as annoying as her older sister Dakota.
Even worse than its lame dissection of white grief is the fact that Reservation Road has no moments of actual tension for a film that has been called, in many publications, a thriller. The climactic outing of Dwight happens at gunpoint near a lake, not unlike Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. But where we were morally compromised by the end of Eastwood’s film, the morals are clear and uncomplicated in Reservation Road. We know what Ethan will do even before he does it.

Chris Cabin