Reservation Road

A Connecticut college professor (Joaquin Phoenix) loses his young son to a hit-and-run and hires the guilty driver (Mark Ruffalo) as his attorney. Not on purpose, of course; the culprit, recently divorced, can’t bring himself to confess for fear that it would forfeit custody of his own boy. Well, uh, yeah. John Burnham Schwartz adapted his own novel with director Terry George, and the result is another of those voguishly solemn trudges that you’re not allowed to call manipulative. With their parallel but opposite emotional arcs—as guilt devours one man from within, the other shrinks to fit his own bitterness—Ruffalo and Phoenix are both in top form, but also in their comfort zones. George also employs one of recent cinema’s most gifted melodrama deniers, Jennifer Connelly, as Phoenix’s wife, and Mira Sorvino’s in there too, as Ruffalo’s ex and the dead boy’s music teacher (yeah, small town), but without enough to do.