Reservation Road

Year 14, Day 125 - 5/5/22 - Movie #4,128

BEFORE: Well, I guess I've got room for one more revenge-driven film this week, before my Mother's Day programming kicks in. Mark Ruffalo carries over from "Infinitely Polar Bear".

It's Day 2 of Quarantine 2 - only 5 days this time, hopefully, not several months like lockdown was back in 2020.  Theoretically on Monday if we're feeling better we can go get PCR tests, that would be the first step in getting back to work this time.  The theater found somebody to cover my shifts, which is great, and I had to answer a bunch of questions about who I worked with on Tuesday night, before I got my positive test results.  I guess those people need to be notified or tested, but I felt a bit like I was turning in fellow Commie sympathizers during the McCarthy hearings. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Human Capital" (Movie #4,095)

THE PLOT: The lives of two families change forever after a fatal tragedy takes place on Reservation Road. 

AFTER: OK, so this one's not like the others, it's still loss and revenge that drives this film, but essentially this is a drama, not an action film.  The four films within the last week that had VERY similar plots had a lot of fistfights and gunplay in them, while this one's more on the quite, introspective side, as one family deals with the loss of their son when he's struck by a car, and in the other family, the father has to deal with the fact that he was the driver, and he chose to drive away, then try to cover up his crime.  And there's a sort of balance in the fact that one couple is together and is nearly torn apart by the accident, and the other family is already split by divorce, but the accident kind of connects them back in a weird way, namely that the dead boy's sister takes piano lessons from the driver's ex-wife, I guess maybe that's to be expected in a small town in Connecticut.  

Also, the driver, Dwight, is some kind of attorney, or paralegal perhaps, and the law firm he works for is hired by the father whose son was killed, in order to keep an eye on the police and make sure that they don't neglect the case.  I'm not sure if a person would hire a lawyer for that, to keep an eye on the cops, something tells me that police detectives wouldn't like being investigated like that on an active case, but what do I know?  Again, it's small-town Connecticut so everybody probably knows everybody else, so maybe it is something you might hire an attorney to do.  If, that is, one had a certain distrust of the police, and again, that's something that the police might not appreciate. 

Really, the real culprit here is the attorney's ex-wife, the piano teacher.  If she hadn't been so uptight about her ex-husband being late getting back from the Red Sox game, then maybe he wouldn't have had to speed through those backroads to get home, and then maybe he wouldn't have hit the boy with his car.  Just saying. 

All along, Dwight is paranoid about being found out, having someone realize that his vehicle was the one that night, lying to his own son about what the car hit, lying to the police by telling them he no longer owns that car, that he donated it to charity, and thus one lie creates a hundred more, and he keeps digging himself in deeper.  He nearly confesses at the police station, but can't quite bring himself to do that, and instead realizes that he's got inside information about the case, that the cops aren't even close to making an arrest. 

However, Ethan, the father of the dead boy, won't stop his own investigation, and perhaps it's just a matter of time before he puts the pieces together himself, especially if he keeps following the advice from the online support group for parents of hit & run victims.  So the only question becomes whether Dwight can bring himself to confess before Ethan catches up with him to dispense some form of vigilante justice - and, what will it take for Ethan to accept the tragedy and move on?  Really, this ended up being sort of a think-piece, which separates this from those action movies on a similar topic - this is more like an in-action movie. 

My only NITPICK POINT tonight is a very weird depiction of a school concert.  It's a strange mix of ballet, musical performance and a comedy skit, and I just don't get it.  I went to school in Massachusetts, and a school concert was usually a performance from an organized chorus in elementary school, then later in junior high there would be a school orchestra or band, but I've never seen a ballet performance put on by a public school.  Ballet school was always a private thing, as far as I knew, not part of a school curriculum, so it feels like some screenwriter here sort of conflated a ballet recital, a piano recital, a school concert and a school talent show, which in my experience, would be four different things, and not combined into one show.  But hey, maybe the Connecticut school music program is very different from my experience. 

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Mira Sorvino (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), John Slattery (last seen in "Churchill"), Eddie Alderson (last seen in "Changeling"), Sean Curley (last seen in "The Men Who Stare at Goats"), Antoni Corone (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Cordell Clyde, Gary Kohn, Nora Ferrari, Linda Dano, John Rothman (last seen in "The Report"), Geisha Otero (last seen in "Monster" (2018)), Brett Haley (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Armin Amiri (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Stephanie Weyman, David Anzuelo, with a cameo from Bill Camp (last seen in "Passing")

RATING: 5 out of 10 baseball pennants