Word: ruffalo
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...movies, Reservation Road and Things We Lost in the Fire, take up this theme. In the former, a lawyer named Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo) is rushing to return his son to his estranged wife, when his car hits and kills a small boy. Panicked, he flees the scene, becoming a guilt-ridden hit-and-run driver. In the latter, a father goes out to buy ice cream for his family, intervenes in a street corner act of domestic violence and is murdered for his trouble. Both movies concern themselves primarily with the aftermath of these shocking crimes, Reservation Road...
...That's largely because Road, directed and co-written by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), is much more plausibly character driven. We feel we know these people, possibly might even be these people in certain circumstances. There is, for example, something recognizably feckless in Ruffalo's character, clinging narrowly to respectability as a small-town lawyer, but running behind in everything from his support payments to his housekeeping habits. He loves his son deeply, but somehow doesn't seem to know what to do with him besides ordering pizza and watching ballgames with him. In particular, he has lost any hope...
...will have none of that, and a curious thing happens as he embraces what amounts to temporary insanity; our sympathy shifts to Ruffalo's Dwight, as slowly he begins to rediscover his better self. We have no doubt that, eventually, he will do the right thing and turn himself in. If, that is, the grief-maddened Ethan does not find and kill him before that happens. Put simply, the suspense of this movie derives less from its dramatic premise than it does from vivid, increasingly contrasted, characters. It sometimes feels a bit repetitive - each of the two men is stuck...
...wannabe, with the young Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) as Woodward and Bernstein, and his senior colleague Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) as a crusty Ben Bradlee type with a lot more showmanship and a mile-wide self-destructive streak. Their sleuthing sometimes helps, mostly annoys detectives Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). When Toschi is asked, "Have you considered that the killer might be Paul Avery?", he deadpans, "Frequently...
Fincher, whose work on Fight Club and Panic Room displayed his expertise in melding the suspenseful and the lurid, plays it cool here. He lets his stars do their thing: Ruffalo emitting just a whisper of rage under his just-the-facts-ma'am demeanor; Downey playing the chatty, suicidal genius (the actor's line readings always have a jazzman's musical ingenuity); and Gyllenhaal in his winsome mode, looking like a puppy who just got swatted with a newspaper by the master he somehow still adores. The star quality has to carry the movie, all 2 1/2 hours...