"Reservation Road" | Family men in the crosshairs of fate

If you see one Joaquin Phoenix movie this month, make it "We Own the Night." But he's almost as good in a less complex role in "Reservation Road," a hit-and-miss drama about two families that are nearly destroyed by a hit-and-run crime.

Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly play a couple who are devastated by the death of their 10-year-old son in a traffic accident. The guilty driver, played by Mark Ruffalo, speeds away from the crime scene before he or his van can be identified, and the police find themselves without enough clues to act.

The director, Terry George ("Hotel Rwanda"), handles all of this with a fine sense of the exasperatingly random nature of the accident. If Ruffalo's character hadn't been speeding to make an appointment with his fed-up ex-wife, if Phoenix and Connelly hadn't made a crucial stop on their way home, if their boy hadn't been in the wrong place at precisely the wrong moment ... well, there are a whole lot of "ifs," and they're carefully and wrenchingly underlined.

But then George and his co-

writer, John Burnham Schwartz (who also wrote the 1998 novel of the same name), start to explore "In the Bedroom" territory, and they're not really up to it. Phoenix and Connelly's marriage starts to implode, Phoenix feels forced into vigilante action, Ruffalo hides his damaged van in the garage, and "Reservation Road" begins to take on the single-minded qualities of a TV movie.

It doesn't help when a hard-to-buy coincidence brings Ruffalo and Phoenix together and sets up an unsatisfying final act. Forced into the background are Connelly, Mira Sorvino (as Ruffalo's ex-wife) and Elle Fanning and Eddie Alderson as the surviving kids — who must surely be the most traumatized characters here.

Still, Phoenix and Ruffalo are so effective that the movie is likely to become a must for their fans. Bound by their characters' similarities, they present a feverish dual portrait of family men whose brush with fate leaves them both unhinged.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com