Revenge
and sympathy

>> Director Terry George on Reservation Road,
his fresh take on vigilante justice

by MATTHEW HAYS

Themes and motifs seem to come in mysterious waves on the big screen, and this last season has seen the revenge movie come back with, well, a vengeance. Last summer saw Kevin Bacon kicking criminal ass in Death Sentence, while the fall also had Jodie Foster taking the law into her own hands in Neil Jordan’s The Brave One.

American audiences have a long-running love affair with revenge—a dish best served cold, as the Klingon proverb famously goes—but for every mindless movie made about the subject (take any of the Death Wish sequels, for example), there have been thoughtful entries. See Joe (1970) or the more recent In the Bedroom (2001) and Mystic River (2003), for example. Director Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, Some Mother’s Son) works to add to the list of thought-provoking meditations on the possibilities of revenge with his latest film, Reservation Road.

George acknowledges taking the most unbearable of circumstances—the death of a child—and using it to ramp up the emotional ante in his film. Based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road has two fathers (Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo) involved in a tragic car accident that leaves Phoenix’s son dead. Later frustrated that the authorities won’t help him exact the kind of justice he thinks should be levelled against Ruffalo, Phoenix then ventures to take matters into his own hands. It’s a familiar scenario, but George manages to keep things fresh and unexpected.

“Sometimes, there’s a certain zeitgeist that occurs in the movies that’s just inexplicable,” says George, discussing the issue at the Toronto International Film Festival. “With this theme, though, it’s slightly less surprising to me. The mood of the U.S. after 9/11 was about revenge. And there was a strong sense of powerlessness, because the powers that be in the government appeared to be hopeless. That cultural atmosphere ultimately gets reflected in the movies.”

Personal and political

While developing the screenplay for Reservation Road, George says he looked at a broad range of movies about vengeance. “I looked at the way it had been done in the past. But you know, In the Bedroom goes far more into the vigilante movie than I do. And there was a certain politics woven into Mystic River. I think Reservation Road is a far more personal film.”

George says he wanted to go beyond the idea of getting back at someone who’s done you wrong. “For me, the revenge element wasn’t as important as seeing the other side of the coin. That’s why Mark’s character is so important to me.” George says the crucial casting call came with Ruffalo, an actor he says elicits intense audience sympathy. “When you see Mark, you know he’s a decent guy. Sometimes you see an actor and you don’t know what they’re all about. But when you see Mark, he has this decency about him. When he was in Collateral, he was the most appealing character in that film. I needed that for this role. I needed the audience to be a bit confused in their perceptions and feelings, to be challenged. It would have been too easy to have a character who wasn’t likeable.”

Showing the

Despite the talk of Reservation Road being more personal, George is soon conceding that part of what makes him so passionate about the idea of forgiveness are his own feelings about how far his native Ireland has come with the peace process. In other words, this movie does have political undertones.

“I can’t think of a more serious problem to grab an audience than the death of a child. It’s the fear every parent has—on that level, this story becomes a Greek tragedy. And I learned by watching the situation unfold in Northern Ireland. Governments demonize the opposition to a point where rage kicks in, and then there’s no possibility for rational communication to resolve anything. This film provided a chance to show the other side.

“The perpetrator is, at the end of the day, just a guy who’s made mistakes in his life and then has this terrible twist of fate. I wanted to contrast those two things, and to show how a sense of redemption can be possible. Ultimately, I didn’t want to make a vigilante movie—I never really perceived it that way at all.”

Reservation Road opens
this Friday, Oct. 26

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