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'Rails & Ties'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

October 26, 2007

Is there any working actress who has wept as fulsomely and inexhaustibly as Marcia Gay Harden?

In her latest bout with the pitiless gods of Hollywood fate, the ever-suffering Ms. Harden plays Megan Stark, a nurse who has entered stage four of cancer. Megan can find no surcease from sorrow in her train engineer husband Tom (Kevin Bacon), a stone-faced stoic who retreats from his wife's illness and rams a passenger train into a suicidal woman who has planted her car on the tracks.

What is a childless, prematurely dying woman with a husband in denial and threatened with losing his job supposed to do?

Well, she can devote her remaining days to the dead woman's bereft young son Davey (Miles Heizer), who has fled from a callous foster home. Never mind that the boy would have to face the back-to-back loss of two caring mothers. Answered prayers do not come any needier, not to say cuter, than Davey.

Nor do scripts come any sudsier than Micky Levy's awesomely bathetic "Rails & Ties," which would arguably never have seen the dark of a screening room were it not for Alison Eastwood, daughter of Dirty Harry, making her directing debut.

Like Bacon's rule-obsessed character, Levy operates so determinedly by the book that the audience actively resists being sucked in, which is really a shame since we could all do with a good, honest cry. Eastwood keeps the script's creaky gears oiled, abetted by the editor, cinematographer, production designer, and composer of pater's "Letters from Iwo Jima."

Any resemblances between that picture and this, had they existed, would have made for a strange but interesting experience.

RAILS & TIES (PG-13). Dying woman, accident-ridden husband, suicidal mother, orphaned son. Alison Eastwood, in her directing debut, turns on the waterworks. Marcia Gay Harden, Kevin Bacon and little Miles Heizer oblige her. 1:40 (mature thematic elements, an accident scene, brief nudity and momentary strong language). At the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Square, Manhattan.