Rails and Ties

Perhaps fittingly for a daughter of Hollywood royalty, Alison Eastwood in her directorial debut harks back in Rails and Ties to an old-fashioned reading of life's tragic blows and victims rising sad but unbowed to struggle, together, forward. In a screenplay by Nicky Levy, Tom (Kevin Bacon), a railroad engineer whose wife Megan (Marcia Gay Harden) has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has just a short time to live, drives his train through a crossing where Laura (Bonnie Root) has suicidally parked, with her young, unknowing son, Davey (Miles Heizer). Tom knows that in slowing the train gradually rather than braking suddenly, as required by the rulebook, he has probably saved many lives by preventing train cars from uncoupling and derailing. Still, Laura is dead and Davey just barely survived.

While routinely suspended during an investigation, Tom must face the reality of Megan's impending death. Or must he? Rather, he closes down and refuses to communicate or even to openly acknowledge the inevitable.  Megan becomes increasingly frustrated and needy, especially at the couple's childlessness. Just as she prepares to leave him to spend her last days in a long-dreamed-of San Francisco holiday, a knock comes at the door.

In presenting the knocker as Davey, alone and orphaned, badly handled by a caseworker for Children's Services (Marin Hinkle), Miss Eastwood and Ms. Levy drink at the Hollywood Fable Pond, but at least they do so in a clean, crisp, efficient manner, with a lack of obvious sentimentality. Initially bitter and angry at Tom for "murdering" his mother, Danny soon warms to Megan and she to him (this is Hollywood, after all), who sidelines her San Francisco dreamin' and takes in the needy orphan, this of course against railroad rules while the investigation proceeds. Predictably, but without bathos, the new little family (photographed warmly by director of photography Tom Stern and edited neatly by Gary Roache, both former collaborators of Clint Eastwood) bonds and prepares for Megan's death.

Ms. Eastwood is helped immeasurably by her actors: Harden and Bacon yin and yang each other perfectly. He is the pressed-tight container, she the impassioned arms struggling to open it. Young Mr. Heizer is something of a revelation: in what could easily have been a clichéd, tear-wrenching exercise, he underplays convincingly and gives off low-key sparks.

One scene of note involves Ms. Harden looking at herself in a bathroom mirror, stripped to the waist, contemplating a lost breast. It is a difficult and brutal and necessary scene, handled elegantly and touchingly. It is one of several scenes where the potential raw emotionality of the tale breaks through the reserve and remove of the somewhat clinical narrative.

We may have a lot to look forward to in Ms. Eastwood's future work.

                                                           Howard Buck