HALFWAY through the absurd drama “,” I was thinking: Oh no. After a train runs over a suicidal woman who intentionally parked her car on the tracks, I thought, please don’t let the guy who drove the train (Kevin Bacon) – and is catching hell from his dying wife (Marcia Gay Harden) about how they never had a kid – take in the adorable son of the woman he just ran over. Please!
But that’s exactly what this soppy death drama is about. The boy, who barely escaped the car his mom drove in front of the train, runs away from his new foster family and goes looking for revenge against the driver of the train. The Bacon character, knowing that he is both tampering with a witness and illegally harboring the kid, is kind to him and lets him move in while missing-person posters are papering the neighborhood.
Throughout, there is so much symbolic chatter about trains that I was reminded of the Agatha Christie-ish Monty Python sketch that begins with a man lying dead on the floor but morphs into bizarre railway babble that reveals the killer. (“So how did you make the connection with the 8.13 which left six minutes earlier?” “Oh, er, simple! I caught the 7.16 Football Special arriving at Swindon at 8.09.”)
The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.
Running time: 100 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, brief nudity, violent accidents). At the Angelika and the Lincoln Square.