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'Reservation Road'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

October 19, 2007

When bad things happen to good people, do we really want to know?

It's an awfully callous question to have to ask, but one that scratched its way onto the edges of my notepad more than once during "Reservation Road," an arduous melodrama set in a high-tax-bracket corner of Connecticut.

Adapted by director Terry George and John Burnham Schwartz from Schwartz's bestselling novel, it stars Mark Ruffalo as a perpetually distracted attorney who does just the wrong thing when his SUV accidentally mows down a young boy standing by the side of the road: He keeps going.

Ruffalo's Dwight Arno feels terrible about it. What's more, we feel terrible for him, since he was obviously under the gun to get his own young son back to his haranguing ex-wife Ruth (a very good Mira Sorvino) after overstaying his visitation day with the boy. And after feeling terrible for Dwight, we start feeling terrible for ourselves, racked as we are with guilty consciences over all the bad moves we've ever tried to sweep under the carpet over the years.

More than anything, however, we feel terrible for Ethan and Grace Learner (Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly), the parents of the dead Josh, whose marriage is beginning to come apart at the seams. Grace is trying to move on and be present for their young daughter, but Ethan, a physics professor, obsesses over ferreting out his son's killer. Feeling strung along by the police, Ethan takes the search into his own hands: He stalks neighborhoods for banged-up SUVs and fans his seething sense of injustice on a Web site for families of hit-and-run victims.

RESERVATION ROAD (R). Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly are parents of a young hit-and-run victim. Mark Ruffalo plays the anguished schmo behind the wheel. Gloomy and overwrought suspense drama from the John Burnham Schwartz novel. Mira Sorvino emerges from the din with an affecting turn as Ruffalo's clueless ex-wife. Terry George directs. 1:42 (language and some disturbing images). At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Sunshine Cinemas, Manhattan.

A clotted two-family soup gets even thicker when (a brief pause for the suspension of disbelief) Ethan unwittingly hires Dwight as his legal counsel, and Ruth, who turns out to have been Josh's music teacher, befriends Grace with an offer to tutor Josh's kid sister.

In book form, Schwartz burrowed beneath the setup's turgid surface with first- and third-person narration that gave voice to the strangled thoughts of its primary characters. Minus the interior urgency of its source material, this screen "Reservation Road" seesaws with schematic monotony between the anguished dads as their paths coil and converge. Mirror images reflect one another, marching in lockstep. Ethan goes to work, Dwight goes to work; Dwight walks through a door, Ethan walks through a door. Like this, a whole movie goes by.

With its overlay of familial despair and retribution amid bucolic New England surroundings, "Reservation Road" plays like warmed-over "In the Bedroom," minus the authentic texture of locale that made a whole fishing community seem to come alive. For all its keyed-up back-and-forth, the movie just sits there and glares at us accusatorily, like the store clerk with a talent for making you feel like you've been shoplifting from the moment you walk in the door.