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"  Movies aren&amp;#039;t always about what they seem to be about -- that&amp;#039;s one of their glories. Case in point: Reservation Road, the latest film by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), which stars Mark Ruffalo as Dwight, a small-town attorney who accidentally hits and kills a boy while driving home from a Red Sox game late one evening. Scared to death, Dwight just drives on, but his law firm subsequently winds up being retained by the dead kid&amp;#039;s justifiably pissed-off father, Ethan (Joaquin Phoenix), who wants to be sure that the scoundrel, when finally caught, doesn&amp;#039;t get off with a slap on the wrist. A contrived, somewhat overwrought variation on In the Bedroom redeemed by a trio of strong performances (including Jennifer Connelly as Ethan&amp;#039;s wife), Reservation Road clearly wants to make a stark, profound statement about guilt and fury, responsibility and revenge. I can&amp;#039;t imagine that anybody involved with this project thought they were making a movie about communication in the age of the Internet. And yet Reservation Road, in its offhanded way, depicts the world of the reasonably affluent 21st-century American more accurately than any other recent film I can think of. When Ethan wants to find out what the likely penalty would be for a hit-and-run offender, he actually does exactly what you or I would do: He Googles the hell out of it, in a scene that for once doesn&amp;#039;t cough up the relevant info nugget at the very first keystroke. Later, he turns for emotional support to a chat group for parents of murdered children, pouring his heart out to strangers rather than to his wife and surviving child. What&amp;#039;s remarkable about this material, paradoxically, is how thoroughly unremarkable it is. Unlike The Net, You&amp;#039;ve Got Mail, Fear Dot Com, and various other labored pseudo-cyber-dramas, Reservation Road has no particular interest in being au courant. Instead, it seems that we&amp;#039;ve finally reached the point where an ordinary Hollywood movie, telling a nongimmicky story, can acknowledge without comment the reality that most of us are plugged in to some sort of network virtually 24/7. Of course, this casual authenticity, pursued to its logical conclusion, may result in a nation of people sitting at computers watching downloaded movies depicting other, much prettier people sitting at computers. But I&amp;#039;d still rather take the red pill than the blue one we&amp;#039;re usually offered. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a3493/reservationroad1107/>