Reservation Road
Directed by: Terry George
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly, Mark Ruffalo
Rated: R
Two stars

I got a very strange impression from watching the trailer of Reservation Road:

The film centers on the effect of a young boy’s death on his father (Joaquin Phoenix) and his killer (Mark Ruffalo), and while the style of the trailer suggested it was a thriller, the background music signaled a drama. I assumed that Terry George, the director of Hotel Rwanda, had his reasons for creating such a blatant contrast.

I think it was pure laziness. The film progresses like a paper in which paragraphs are simply thrown together rather than organized under a solid, coherent thesis. It could not decide which of its conflicting ideas was the central one. For example, at first it seems to be about learning to cope with a difficult situation. While Phoenix’s character has to discover how to manage his grief, Ruffalo’s has to accept responsibility for his actions. Suddenly, this vision is interrupted by a harsh and unresolved commentary on the justice system. The message that I ended up taking away was, “If I can accept that no one is looking for my son’s killer and refuse to take matters into my own hands, I’ll be fine.” Wait, that can’t be right…

Another instance of laziness is George’s resort to stereotyped film techniques. For example, the common sequence in which the camera zooms in on a character’s face and the background noise gradually dies down to show that they are ‘retreating into themselves’ appears several times over the course of the film.

Reservation Road contains some interesting ideas, but like any amateur academic paper, say on the justice system, these ideas are poorly organized and presented.

- Kira Muratova