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| Posted: Lola @ Wed Feb 06, 2008 4:09 pm |
February 6th, 2008
Joaquin Phoenix Is A Man On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown In Reservation RoadBy Jeff Niesel
Primal Fear Phoenix plays a vengeful father. NEW YORK - Written in 1998, John Burnham Schwartz's novel Reservation Road was optioned so that it could become a film shortly after it was published. But when several attempts to make it into a movie were aborted, Schwartz bought the rights back and started writing his own script. It wasn't an easy process, and he went through some six drafts before he finally came up with one that satisfied him.
He wasn't the only one who liked his finished product. When Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix first read the script, he was immediately impressed and decided he wanted to play Ethan, an emotionally distant college professor who loses his son in a drive-by accident and then has to deal with the grief of his wife Grace (Jennifer Connelly) and daughter Emma (Elle Fanning).
"I quite liked the idea of playing someone who had all these suppressed emotions," a particularly disheveled and garrulous Phoenix says during a roundtable discussion held late last year at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel. "You get the sense that they're reasonable people and they come to this primal state."
Phoenix brought the script to the attention of director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), who liked the fact that Phoenix wanted to go against type and play a withdrawn character. Once Connelly was cast and Mark Ruffalo came on board to portray Dwight, the "bad guy" who commits the crime as he's driving his son home one night after a Boston Red Sox game, George knew he had a cast that would require little to no coaching.
"They were so in tune with what they were doing," he says simply.
George and the cast spent some time tweaking Schwartz's script so that it reflected George's concept about the film as an allegory for "revenge as a motivation in a post-9/11 world."
"It's about creating a monster and demonizing a monster that you want to do violence to," George says. "Juxtaposing the two characters and seeing which way they go switches the loyalty and sympathy of the audience. Nothing is ever black and white. I liked the fact there's this loser character that makes a decision that he knows will destroy his entire life. It's about trying to surrender and coming to terms with that that I find interesting."
It's not just Dwight who struggles to come to terms with his actions. All the characters in the film unravel in various ways. Ethan becomes obsessed with seeking revenge and spends all his time on the Internet as he "researches" the facts and figures behind other hit-and-run accidents. He also repeatedly tries to get the local police to take more than a passing interest in his case. His wife Grace becomes almost comatose as she withdraws and can't even bring herself to pick up her daughter after school. In fact, the role was so harrowing for Connelly that she had nightmares about losing her own child and found it difficult to leave her work behind when she went home at the end of the day.
And yet, George calls it the "most accessible movie I've ever done" simply because it's so easy to identify with both the grieving family and the "loser" who feels guilty for having committed a crime but doesn't know how to deal with his actions. The film is almost too uncomfortable to watch at times, especially when the two fathers meet for the first time. And when Ethan hires Dwight, a lawyer, to represent him as he tries to solve the case, the awkward tension rises to levels that are nearly unbearable, which would perhaps explain why the film struggled at the box office when it came out in limited release last year.
Having nice guy Ruffalo play a screw-up almost makes you sympathize more with him, even though he's clearly taken the wrong path. (In the novel, the abusive Dwight, who has trouble controlling his anger, comes off much worse.) But for George, casting Ruffalo against type, and surrounding him with a stellar cast, gave him the dynamic he was looking for.
"His humanity comes across and he brings such nuance to the thing," George says of Ruffalo. "I was just really blessed with the cast."
Reservation Road: 9:35 p.m. Friday, Feb. 8, and 7:35 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9, at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., Cleveland, 216-421-7450, cia.edu.
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Reservation Road
As: Ethan Learner
Status: released on DVD
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