Initially, Phoenix and Connelly deliver heartbreaking performances nearly too painful to watch. Unfortunately, both seem to run out of gas around the middle of the film, almost as if from overexertion.

“Reservation Road” (2007) delivers a shockingly realistic portrait of one of the many horrors that keep parents awake at night. During a pit stop on the way home from a family outing, Ethan and Grace Learner (Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly) witness the unthinkable when their young son is killed by a speeding SUV.

The distracted driver at the wheel is fellow father Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), a divorced lawyer raising his own young son. After panicking briefly, Arno speeds off into the night to promptly hide the crime.

What follows is perhaps one of the most painfully realistic portrayals of a quiet, small town tragedy. As the ensuing investigations begin to stall, the Learner family struggles to maintain sanity and unity amidst growing impatience with the local police. Arno, having seemingly covered all traces of the accident, begins to crumble under his own self-contained guilt.

The claustrophobic nature of the small Connecticut town provides the film’s more uncomfortable moments. As the town reaches out to the damaged Learners, so does Arno’s ex-wife, the local elementary school music teacher, played by Mira Sorvino.

As Learner and Arno’s lives, and the lives of their families, begin to intersect more frequently, each begins to unravel mentally with the memory of the accident haunting them both.

The acting is absolutely gut-wrenching during the initial tragedy. Filmed in a very low-key and matter-of-fact manner, the loss feels so much heavier, like a pedestrian witnessing a friend’s turmoil. The viewer feels affected simply being there.

Director Terry George, who also directed “Hotel Rwanda” (2004), brings a somber subtly to the film. Sights like a noticeably smaller, lighter coffin carry as much visual sorrow as that expressed by the leads.

Initially, Phoenix and Connelly deliver heartbreaking performances nearly too painful to watch. Unfortunately, both seem to run out of gas around the middle of the film, almost as if from overexertion caused by their acting.

Ruffalo gives a consistently tortured portrayal of an ordinary man coming to grips with a terrible mistake of monumental consequence. What’s perhaps most intriguing is what he doesn’t show. Arno’s personal anguish appears actively suppressed and partially hidden under a great deal of conflict and utter confusion, especially when subsequently raising his own son to be a decent, responsible person.

However, between the highly emotional beginning and the breath-stealing conclusion, the whole film breaks down. The plot becomes riddled with bizarre circumstances and melodrama.

The heavy emphasis on Ethan Learner’s participation in a “victims of hit-and-run” chat room feels like an embarrassingly dated holdover from the mid-’90s, quietly cheating viewers out of a potentially powerful visual character transformation by succinctly placing his thoughts in print on the screen.

The sense of what could have been is by far the most frustrating aspect of the film. Peripheral characters like Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino are shelved far too early to collect dust when they could have provided as interesting a dichotomy as Phoenix and Ruffalo. While Arno’s discovery of the identity of Learner is played with almost nauseating precision, Learner’s own discovery of the guilt of Arno – logically the more powerful – is given up to sloppy anticlimactic coincidence. Much of the story simply does not measure up to the emotional weight of the opening.

The film’s conclusion, which strikes without warning, provides minor redemption. The confrontation between Learner and Arno is treated with a sense of realistic dignity, narrowly dodging revenge cliches to present the two fathers as real individuals forever changed and driven to maddening lengths by an all too common accident.

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