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Category: Movies
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 Title: Reservation Road  | views:211 |  Review by John L Ng Apr 08
Reservation Road
Reservation Road is a grim and grievous story. Based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz, the movie begins when night falls on two families. Dwight, played Mark Ruffalo, hurries to drive his son home to his ex-wife after a baseball game. Ethan and Grace, played Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly, are driving home from their son Josh’s cello recital. They stop at a convenient store in a secluded area on Reservation Road. In an incomprehensible and life altering moment, Dwight loses control of his black SUV and hits Josh who is standing on the side of the road. Josh is instantly killed. In a panic, Dwight drives off as Ethan watches in helpless horror.
What follows is a contemplation on how Ethan, Grace and Dwight suffer grief with life’s inexplicable cruelty. Ethan is a college professor with volitional control of mind and body. After the initial visceral shock of watching his son die from the hit and run, he mourns in a quiet cognition. He chooses cold comfort by seeking solace from other victims’ families through an internet chat room and by seeking legal counsel to oversee the police’s investigation. Phoenix’s breaded face gives Ethan a melancholic but calm countenance. But as the investigation flounders, Ethan’s quiet cognition descends into emotional chaos. He buys a gun as he morphs from a comfort seeker into a hunter for his son’s killer. Grace mourns the lost of her son with the fierce but silent screams of a pained mother. Refusing comfort from others, she coils in desolate despair on the bathroom floor. Connelly’s strong beauty lends to Grace’s lonely grief. As days become weeks, she ascends privately from her dark abyss into a determined decision to move on. Ethan and Grace’s grief paths intersect when they fight over what to do with Josh’s belongings. Dwight’s grief over his involuntary transgression is of another kind. Confronted by his guilt, he is a prey chased by rational and irrational moods. One moment he wants to do the right thing and surrenders to the police; the next moment he recoils in moral ambivalence. When Ethan finally encounters him in the dark of night and threatens to kill him, Dwight begs desperately for Ethan to tell him what to do.
Whether we are proudly sitting through our son’s cello recital or happily watching a baseball game with our son, we celebrate life almost oblivious of our flawed and broken human condition. We take so much of what we are and have for granted. Then when a hard tragedy strikes our soft beings, we retreat from community to grieve privately. Ethan hurts in the middle of night before his computer, alone and lonely. Grace hurts quietly as she goes about her maternal chores. She picks up her daughter from school but refrains from human encounters. Dwight desperately wants to connect with his son but his criminal secret confines him to ambivalent solitude. When life is in day light, we enter our relationships with mindless ease. When day turns to night, we retreat into our private selves.
Much of life’s tragedy is incomprehensible. Thousands of children die daily. Although their surviving families mourn somewhere, the thousands are only a number to us. But when one statistic happens on a road close to home, we are not as confident with life’s incomprehensibility. How we get to the other side is determined by how we grief.
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| Review submitted: 2009/2/27
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