Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

Sad, sweet and ultimately redemptive, Rails & Ties uses two tragic turns of event to trigger an ironic story about how character and hope can win out in the end. Likely to find an audience over time, this soulful movie is deeply cathartic for those touched by cancer, childless marriage, suicide or child neglect.

The mix of trains and family redemption resonated with me the first time I saw the trailer (Best Trailers of 2007). Now that I’ve seen the movie, its critical and commercial drubbing seem wholly unjustified. If trafficking in tragedy and improbable twists of fate were unacceptable, most of Hollywood would have to find an honest living. Nor is Rails & Ties just a Lifetime disease-of-the-week movie. It’s more like a fine country song come to life, with trains and the boys who worship them and the men who drive them and the women married to those men all in the cathartic mix.

Sad and ironic country songs can carry a soul away from his own troubles, just as this three handkerchief weeper of a movie can seem a blessing to those dealing with tragic twists of fate.

Plus if you’re into trains – real or model – this is the real deal.

Acting - Great 4.0

Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden display great chemistry as a long-married couple going through loss, tribulation and sweet redemption. Not the most emotive actor, Bacon’s natural reticence fits perfectly with his character’s dutifully mechanical approach to life. Harden – hardly one of my favorites – delivers a superb performance as a woman stricken and blessed. She deserves special commendation for the topless scene in which she mourns her lost breast.

Miles Heizer impresses as the 12 year old who loses not one but two mothers. His emotions come across as entirely believable.

Kathryn Joosten jumps off the screen as the boy’s elderly neighbor. This distinctive actress – most famous as Mrs. Landingham, President Bartlet’s secretary in The West Wing – comes across equally wise and loopy.

Veteran character actress Margo Martindale is effectively chilling as a mercenary foster mother, while Marin Hinkle deftly portrays a warmhearted children’s protective services officer. Between them, we get a sense of the random quality-of-care that children “in the system” receive.

Last but not least, Micky Levy – the movie’s writer – cameos as the female detective looking for the missing boy.

Film - Very Good 3.5

About three quarters of the way in, with ordinary people soldiering on through extreme emotional pain, it struck me that this movie seemed of a piece with recent Eastwood directorial efforts like Changeling, Gran Torino and Mystic River, the last also starring Bacon and Harden. When the credits finally rolled, it turns out it is an Eastwood movie, only the director isn’t Clint but his daughter Alison.

Though Rails & Ties – her directorial debut – got run out of theaters on a rail, she can take heart that she has made a fine film, deeply in the family tradition.

Edge - Risqué 1.6

The hand of fate is shown a couple of times, including a brutal train accident and a post-mastectomy breast.

Reality - Glib 1.1

Could an orphan slip so easily through the cracks? It worked out for the best in the movie, but let’s hope not.

Would such a boy forgive and bond with the people involved with his mother’s death? Perhaps surprising to some, this is not unlikely. Transferable parental attachment is a classic coping mechanism for neglected children whose original parents failed them. Plus the smart boy in the movie correctly concludes that his mother’s suicide made the train’s driver a fellow innocent victim.

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