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Death in the slow lane

Filling the big screen with small-screen fare
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 19th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Cliches at dusk. A touching, familial moment before the drama. Cue the violins.
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Reservation Road


Directed by Terry George
With Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly, Mark Ruffalo, Mira Sorvino and Elle Fanning
If the critic-sung panegyrics over the renaissance in Hollywood films were premature, friends are making an argument for a dramatic rebirth occurring in American television. Not, it must be said, among the once-powerful networks, which can only offer their obese base a steady sugar drip of American Idol and what appear to be outtakes from The Howard Beale Show, but at such cable giants as HBO, Showtime and the Sci-Fi Channel.
Indeed, friends Stateside and in the United Kingdom seem incapable of curbing their enthusiasm for The Wire, Big Love, Deadwood, Californication, Battlestar Galactica, Rome, Dexter and Six Feet Under (all of which I’ve missed). It does sound like a television revolution.
Yet are there any safe harbors left for the tried-but-true Disease of the Week epics and “searing” family sagas that were once small-screen staples, since Fox, CBS, et alia are obviously dedicated to entertaining the La-Z-Boy lounge class, while cable boldly assumes that its audience is at least in possession of taste? There is the Hallmark Channel, which would seem ideal, though its bread and drippings are made primarily through reruns of Touched by an Angel and Little House on the Prairie.
Enter Hollywood film studios, which can’t be expected to make a There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men or Darjeeling Limited every month, and which have probably reached the bottom of their pirate chest filled with old comics and sitcoms (though we are being threatened with Get Smart soon). How else to explain the green light for Reservation Road?
The film is a superficial family drama of loss, where a husband and wife must deal with the death of their beloved, talented son, who has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. This “searing” trip to the misery well couldn’t seem more TV-stunted, though it has a first-rate cast fronting it.
The story, about which we are invited to feel strongly, lies in the immediate aftermath of the son’s death, with husband Ethan (Joaquin Phoenix), wife Grace (Jennifer Connelly) and their surviving sprog Emma (Elle Fanning) trying to come to terms with the tragedy. Tears, like the glistening fat on a cooking ham, will be shed, and Ethan and Grace’s marriage will begin to unravel through bickering and by-rote histrionics.
The haunted Ethan decides that he can only find (that awful term) “closure” by hunting down the hit-and-run driver. Toward this end he hires lawyer Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), who doesn’t seem keen to take on the assignment. The reason for Arno’s hesitancy is due to the fact that (gasp!) he was the hit-and-run driver.
Nothing is spoiled by providing this claptrap plot point, as it’s obvious at the top of the film who the careless driver was. Reservation Road is less a whodunnit than an excuse to allow Ruffalo, Phoenix and Connelly to impersonate torment — searingly so. Throw Mira Sorvino into the mix as Arno’s estranged wife, and you have quite a few people to mail Hallmark sympathy cards to.
All of the above are good actors, yet their response to the script’s inane, predictable dialogue, as well as to the film’s inert pacing, is to wildly overcompensate with theatricality of the amateur barnstorming variety. Their emoting is less than studied; it seems rented. At least we have a swelling score to helpfully dictate to us what our own emotional state should be, scene by scene.
Can Ethan and Grace brace their crumbling marriage? Will Dwight Arno realize that no amount of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Doritos can assuage his guilt? What will Ethan do when he discovers that the man he hired to help will hurt him? Actually, who’s ahead on American Idol?

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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