Toronto - Jennifer Connelly really shouldn’t do this to herself (and consequently her fans) anymore. Look at the imdb listing of recent offerings from her. Requiem for a Dream, House of Sand and Fog, Little Children, and now Reservation Road. Seriously. Just reading that list made me manically depressed. What, A Beautiful Mind broke that line, but it’s also not entirely happy. Blood Diamond? She was barely a figment of imagination under Archer’s skin. Granted, she was good in each of those films, even discounting nudity and other insane stunts. But there wasn’t one movie where her characters and their cohort aren’t suffering 2hr-long accelerated downward-spirals-with-occasional-derailment to hell. So. Reservation Road certainly wasn’t going to break that tradition.

As soon as the movie starts you can see it’s not going to end well. Two families are portrayed in their prime, and of course the screenplay wouldn’t work in the traditional sense if their paths do not cross. Little Josh gets to play road kill and the lawyer who will handle this exact case decides to perform a hit-and-run. The rest of the film has the father of the boy seek revenge on the lawyer. I thought the most powerful part about the movie was the obsession a wrongful death can grip normal, even excellent characters. Even as calm as the college professor can be in a debate over policies and morality, Ethan still cannot out-run vengeance. But then contrast his reaction to Grace, who came across for me at least to be very cold and unforgiving, you see the other extreme.

I’m still not totally convinced that denial was a solution and I think the screenplay could have been more lenient on Grace to express her grief other than those small bursts of utter devastation. Which is also what I didn’t like about this film. Yes. A sense of total sadness is a powerful thing. But when you require the audience to take that too frequently, they get uncomfortable and really, denial sets in so that we mentally remove the association and even sympathy with the characters. In this case, I prefer the slow creepy demise of House of Sand and Fog and Requiem over the overnight transformation of Reservation Road. Of course, there’s also guilt from the lawyer Dwight. But I felt that was like background decoration to the grief. Sure you want to feel sorry for him, but you also want to see a bullet through his head.

Verdict? JC wasn’t baring twins. But this is still something you want to see if you need to come down from a sugar high.

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