Psychology of the hit-and-run driver
Director Terry George on his tragic look at 'Reservation Road'
Published 10/25/2007
by David Lamble
"For years now, I've dealt with the whole St. Patrick's Day Parade. I remember when my son was six, it was the first time that that controversy broke out, and I have a photograph with my son with a plastic megaphone, and he said, 'I'm Irish, I'm gay, and I'm proud of it,' when he's six years old! He's not now, but it wouldn't bother him either way, you know. And that was like the start of his political education." — Terry George, director of Reservation Road.
As Irish-born filmmaker Terry George chuckles over memories of his now 20something son's political baptism on the streets of New York, there must somewhere be shards of memory about his own boyhood on the streets of Belfast. Arrested in 1971 by British police for suspected involvement with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), George was released in 1978 and soon lit out for New York, where his path crossed that of another exile, aspiring writer/director Jim Sheridan. Over a decade, the duo combined their talents to produce a trilogy of gut-wrenching but thoughtful dramas chronicling the struggle to end sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
In his latest film Reservation Road, the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident incites a homicidal collision between two distraught fathers. Each film in the Irish trilogy pushes the parental bond to the breaking point and beyond: 1993's In the Name of the Father finds a father and son resisting interrogation while sharing a British prison cell; in Every Mother's Son, a pacifist mom must decide whether to save her son, convicted in a school bombing, from starving to death in an IRA-backed hunger strike; in The Boxer, a once-promising pugilist returns from 14 years in prison to resume a long-abandoned romance that involves raising a fellow inmate's son.
Two years ago, George helmed the critically-acclaimed Hotel Rwanda, detailing the true-life account of a Hutu hotel manager's desperate bid to save Tutsi refugees, including his own Tutsi wife and half-Tutsi son from the genocidal tide of revenge killings.
Having returned from the modern version of what Joseph Conrad once called "The Horror," why was Terry George eager to spend a couple years bringing the American domestic tragedy that's at the core of John Burnham Schwartz's novel Reservation Road to the screen?
He says the project was motivated in part by the huge debt of gratitude he felt towards his star, Joaquin Phoenix, on Hotel Rwanda . "He came to South Africa, played a role basically for free, and gave it a kind of intensity to where one of his lines became one of the most quoted lines in the whole film, where he said, 'People will watch this and say it's terrible, and go on eating their dinner.'"
George says that the actor brought him a draft of a screenplay by novelist Burnham. Two families celebrate the rituals of a perfect early fall New England day. Driving home from a Boston Red Sox game, Dwight (Mark Ruffalo) is racing to meet his estranged ex-wife's deadline for returning their 10-year-old son Lucas.
Rounding a turn on a dark road, Dwight's SUV hits and kills 10-year-old Josh Lerner while Josh's father Ethan (Phoenix) looks on, helpless and horrified. His own son suffering minor injuries in the collision, the fearful Dwight drives on into the night, leaving Ethan with his grief and the dilemma of tracking and seeking revenge against his son's killer.
The movie suffers from a didactic whiplash of grief as each man struggles to cope. It also capitalizes on perhaps one too many dramatic coincidences, the most damning of which involves Ethan hiring Dwight's law firm to track the killer when the police investigation hits a wall.
Brando quality
George says he was surprised when Phoenix expressed his desire to play Ethan rather than Dwight. "At first I thought he was going to play the darker character. Ethan is the more mundane character, with a sort of boring life. It's a departure for Joaquin, in that he usually plays the more extroverted, darker characters. What Joaquin brings is a sort of Brandoesque intensity — he looks to carry a character out not just in the mannerisms, but the soul of the character."
The really hard task was to convince Ruffalo to take on the dark mess that is Dwight. "To ask an actor to play one of the more cowardly actions by a character you can imagine, driving away from an accident where a child is left dying in the road — we had to twist his arm a bit. But I needed Mark, because there's a thing that Mark projects out through the screen to an audience. We know that Mark Ruffalo in real life is a decent, honorable, good guy. I needed that basic charisma for this character."
George admits that Reservation Road presented a huge challenge for him, to depict the oddly specific cultural quirks of his adopted country. The baseball scenes were especially challenging — the film tracks the Red Sox 2004 season as a way of showing Dwight's tenuous bond with his own son. George admits that fixing some of his goofs to satisfy purists of the sport cost the production precious time and money. But ultimately, George thinks his Irish roots helped him see America in a special light.
"The American culture is part of the subtext of the film. Here's a family: the Joaquin Phoenix/Jennifer Connolly family, the perfect nuclear family in the perfect setting. Their ideal life is rent apart by this one event. The universality of the grief and pain, and the need to get over it, that attracted me.
"But being from Belfast in Northern Ireland, I also had a sense of how we in Belfast in extended family dealt with the ritual of death and its process. I just wanted to create that in an American setting, and hopefully create things that make audiences think about that."
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