Rails & Ties

Rails & Ties, an old-style, plain-talking Hollywood tearjerker, doesn't seem designed for today's primal moviegoers. It's closer to a small kind of affecting and simple human story we rarely get to see in mainstream movies anymore. But in spite of some obvious pacing flaws, director Alison Eastwood (Clint's daughter)—in her first turn behind the cameras—does her family name proud with a generally fine, deeply emotional and heartfelt film that is there waiting for an audience to surrender to it. You either really will or you really won't. Kevin Bacon is a train engineer who makes a tragic decision to keep his locomotive running smack into a car that a suicidal woman has parked on the tracks. This sparks an investigation and causes more family woes for a man who has also frozen in the tracks of his marriage to a woman (Marcia Gay Harden) dying of cancer. Although there is great tension in their relationship, she tries to change things by taking in the young son (Miles Heizer) of the person who ended her life in front of Bacon's train. For this childless couple, he provides a momentary spark and potential for renewed hope. This very quiet family drama has the feel of something Clint himself might've done, and in fact, his daughter used the same crew from dad's films to make it go a little easier, right down to Clint's Mystic River costars. Harden delivers an uncompromising performance, matched by Bacon, as a man who somewhere along the way just lost touch with life.