Reservation Road
Directed by Terry George
Some movies look formulaic but aren’t. Reservation Road is in the familiar suburban terror genre but Joaquin Pheonix and Mark Ruffalo give it emotionally credible nuances. Phoenix’s media professor Ethan Learner and Ruffalo’s lawyer Dwight Arno share an agonizing fated relationship. Both fathers of teenage sons are brought together by a car accident on a suburban highway and are faced with the tragic, unfair loss of what defines them as adult men.
Ethan and Dwight become antagonists, similar to the shrill action-movie gimmicks of Domestic Disturbance (2001) and Arlington Road (1999). But something happened since those films—that Variety routinely describes as “suspensers”—causing director-writer Terry George to look deeper at the circumstance of men in crisis. He charts the psychological essence of grief, torment and existential helplessness, and Pheonix and Ruffalo hit the exact notes. That’s because Ethan and Dwight represent the uncertainty and emotional exhaustion of 9/11.
If these protagonists were women, the temptation would be to call the film melodrama, but George conscientiously flips perception—just as Neil Jordan did by taking Jodie Foster’s The Brave One out of the action-film format into psychological melodrama. Ethan and Dwight act out grief, even when they simply languish and suffer. Like The Brave One, the eventual appearance of a gun merely signifies their impotence. For filmmakers George and Jordan, whose movies reflect the experience of Ireland’s social troubles and historical familiarity with terrorism, the gun is not just a phallic extension, but an object of frustrated masculine power.
Since 9/11, the difficulty of depicting grief has fallen to filmmakers who must practice the action genre. George and Jordan have found ingenious ways to get inside domestic crisis, searching for the spiritual basis of our everyday conflicts and complexes. Ethan’s class discusses whether “the media is in collusion with politicians” about the war and Dwight chases after father-son symbology with painful desperation that Ethan observes and covets. The scene of Ethan’s mumbled, inarticulate revenge is powerfully sorrowful. Reservation Road isn’t a major achievement like The Brave One, but it’s a significant attempt at showing contemporary moral confusion.
Directed by Terry George
Some movies look formulaic but aren’t. Reservation Road is in the familiar suburban terror genre but Joaquin Pheonix and Mark Ruffalo give it emotionally credible nuances. Phoenix’s media professor Ethan Learner and Ruffalo’s lawyer Dwight Arno share an agonizing fated relationship. Both fathers of teenage sons are brought together by a car accident on a suburban highway and are faced with the tragic, unfair loss of what defines them as adult men.
Ethan and Dwight become antagonists, similar to the shrill action-movie gimmicks of Domestic Disturbance (2001) and Arlington Road (1999). But something happened since those films—that Variety routinely describes as “suspensers”—causing director-writer Terry George to look deeper at the circumstance of men in crisis. He charts the psychological essence of grief, torment and existential helplessness, and Pheonix and Ruffalo hit the exact notes. That’s because Ethan and Dwight represent the uncertainty and emotional exhaustion of 9/11.
If these protagonists were women, the temptation would be to call the film melodrama, but George conscientiously flips perception—just as Neil Jordan did by taking Jodie Foster’s The Brave One out of the action-film format into psychological melodrama. Ethan and Dwight act out grief, even when they simply languish and suffer. Like The Brave One, the eventual appearance of a gun merely signifies their impotence. For filmmakers George and Jordan, whose movies reflect the experience of Ireland’s social troubles and historical familiarity with terrorism, the gun is not just a phallic extension, but an object of frustrated masculine power.
Since 9/11, the difficulty of depicting grief has fallen to filmmakers who must practice the action genre. George and Jordan have found ingenious ways to get inside domestic crisis, searching for the spiritual basis of our everyday conflicts and complexes. Ethan’s class discusses whether “the media is in collusion with politicians” about the war and Dwight chases after father-son symbology with painful desperation that Ethan observes and covets. The scene of Ethan’s mumbled, inarticulate revenge is powerfully sorrowful. Reservation Road isn’t a major achievement like The Brave One, but it’s a significant attempt at showing contemporary moral confusion.
