The film's most blatant flaw is its heavy reliance on contrivance. There are some spoilers here, so don't read on if you plan to ignore my advice and see this film anyway. Everyone ends up knowing everyone in this film, and it becomes almost laughable. Maybe we could have bought into this if Director Terry George made us believe that this was a very small and close knit community. But we don't feel that when the hit and run driver ends up being connected to the family of the victim (and this comes on top of a series of other coincidences), you're only reaction is "You gotta be kidding?" Intensifying the problem is how plot information comes up in forced and often cliched ways. This includes having the hit and run driver's son come to him with a problem at school where "a no good coward" won't fess up to something he's done. Gee, do you think that will prompt dad to look at his own cowardice about not fessing up to his crime? Then the film drifts into something of an unconvincing revenge story.
Reservation Road (rated R) feels like a flawed literary adaptation. It also attempts to deal with grief and loss but in a manner that feels artificial. A much more moving and effective meditation on grief can be found in this week's release of Things We Lost in the Fire.
Companion viewing: Some Mother's Son, The Son's Room, In the Bedroom
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& Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix in Reservation Road (Focus Features)
George began his career writing politically themed Irish films like In the Name of the Father and Some Mother's Son. Then he went on to write and direct the politically themed Hotel Rwanda. Any of those films are better than his latest. But all share an emphasis on delivering a message first and creating an artful, well-crafted film second. George tends to rely on the emotional force of the events he deals with -- coerced confessions, hunger strikes, genocide, a child's death -- to hook audiences and engage their sympathies.
In those earlier films, the weight of the stories and their connection to bigger issues tended to outweigh the artistic shortcomings. But in Reservation Road, the smaller more intimate story seems to make all the flaws stand out in even bolder relief. Maybe the problem stems from a lack of attention to detail. This may sound like a trivial criticism but at one point, a character tells his son let's go and pick up a pizza pie. Then the film cuts to them at home eating Chinese food. Trivial point? Yes. But it goes to the film's bigger problems which involve things that don't make sense and don't seem thought through completely.
