If you’re a perfect, WASP-y Connecticut family, one in which
your beautiful, polite children catch lightning bugs after sublime
cello recitals, and your life seems content in that uniquely smug New
England way, don’t you imagine you’d be really, really fucked up
if some SUV driver plowed over your son and kept driving? At the very
least, wouldn’t you take a couple weeks off work to grieve?
This hit and run is the central event in Reservation Road (not to be confused with the upcoming Leonardo DiCaprio flick,
Revolutionary Road), and it happens early in the film. Ethan and
Grace Learner (Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly) stop one night at
a gas station, and when their son Josh gets out to release some
fireflies (New England is so clichéd), SUV driver Dwight (Mark
Ruffalo) runs him over, and in a moment of panic, drives off.
From here, the movie follows both men as they deal with the
aftermath of the homicide: Dwight, who seemingly gets away with the
accident scot-free, is racked with guilt and paranoia, while dad Ethan
becomes a man obsessed (and by “obsessed,” I mean he stays up all night
on chat rooms for parents of hit-and-run victims).
Based on its concept, Reservation Road should have been an
all-out gut-wrench fest. If you’re going to have a plot device as
emotionally manipulative as a dead child, I should at least choke up
once, right? But after a day or two of grieving, Grace seems to have
moved on pretty well, and Joaquin Phoenix, whose character is
supposedly going off the deep end, oddly plays the part with stoic
reserve. (He truly comes alive in the film’s climax, however, and turns
this inner anger into a seething rage with incredible intensity.)
Ruffalo is the far more interesting character: On one hand, he’s an
arrogant lawyer dickbag, but he’s also a prisoner of his own guilt and
fears, which tighten with each passing day. Ultimately, it’s hard to
feel much sympathy for him, though, since he, you know, drove away
after running over a little kid and everything, and could turn himself
in whenever he wanted.
Or maybe he just shouldn’t have been a self-obsessed prick speeding
down a country road while he was digging for his cell phone in the
first place, and he could have spared us all the hassle.