Reservation Road
(R)

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Grace and Ethan Learner (Jennifer Connelly and Joaquin Phoenix) enjoy their kids' recital.

Reservation Road, a movie version of John Burnham Schwartz's novel, offers Joaquin Phoenix as a bookish, bearded college professor and suburban father seeking vengeance for the hit-and-run death of his young son. It's essentially an ensemble drama about how an unbearable tragedy affects two families -- the grieving parents (Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly), the messed-up lawyer who killed their child (Mark Ruffalo), a teacher (Mira Sorvino) who happens to be Ruffalo's ex-wife, and their young son (Eddie Alderson), a casual acquaintance of the dead boy.

Sgt. Burke (Antoni Corone) grills the hit-and-run dad (Mark Ruffalo).

The subject matter is bleak and gripping -- it's part psychodrama, part thriller -- and the four leading actors (Phoenix especially) are very good, even if someone needs to impose a multi-year moratorium right now on Jennifer Connelly's crying on screen. Yet, somehow, the film directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) feels curiously detached and schematic, its details, behaviors and settings sketched-in rather than fully realized. That may be because the movie hinges on so many absurd coincidences and wavers uneasily between the insightful, lacerating precision of, say, In the Bedroom and a straight-ahead blood-and-guts revenge thriller. This movie wants to have it both ways and winds up being too thin to be arty and too half-hearted to pack a real emotional punch as a thriller.

by Stephen Rebello

credit: Macall Polay/Focus Features