Reservation Road

This is not only a riveting film that deals with courage and lack of it. This is a devastatingly eviscerating moral parable about a victim's need for closure and a perpetrator's battle with his guilt. Only a very few movies have dealt with the struggle between a man's tortured conscience and his denial on one side and mourning and letting go on the other. One story line brings Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment to mind while the other one evokes the story line of Brad Pitt's character in Babel.

Jennifer Connelly's depiction of a mother suffering an unbearable loss is so heartbreaking it cuts right through you with its fidelity to genuine real life pain. Joaquin Phoenix portrays desperation with such force you understand and sympathize with his character and what he's going through. The intensity and emotional impact of this movie is as great as The House of Sand and Fog, The Shawshank Redemption and Five Easy Pieces. The ending holds a thought-provoking revelation for the main character that reads like an epiphany as he understands what his only rescue is from the crushing injustice bearing down on him.

Reservation Road deserves to be considered a classic in retrospect since it has that unique power to hold you in its grip and not letting go until the credits roll. Every nuance in the narration achieves a resonance of truth and the viewers will be thinking for a long time about its implications on their lives. Ultimately it's a story about love and how the loss of what we treasure most changes our lives forever, how our undying love in the time of death makes us suffer and seek revenge and retribution but in the end prevail it all.