Rails & Ties: Review By Brokaw

Alison Eastwood is perhaps best known for being the daughter of Clint Eastwood. She is also an actress and now adds director to her list of accomplishments. With Rails and Ties, Alison makes her directorial debut and shows everyone that it's not only who you know that can open doors, but what you know as well. She obviously has learned a lot from her father. This film is a winner and will bring Alison out of the shadow of her famous father. She has the talent to stand on her own.

The movie centers on Tom and Megan Stark (Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden), who have been busy with their lives and haven't taken the time to stop and smell the roses, so to speak. Tom is a train engineer and loves his job. He loves trains and their entire garage is one big model train set-up. When Megan's cancer returns for the third time, they realize their time together is short. She focuses on the fact that they never had any children and never took the time to visit San Francisco, a place she has wanted to go.

This upsets their equilibrium, and they seem to be emotionally disconnected. Then something happens that changes everything. Tom's train hits a car killing the woman driver. Her young son, Davey (Miles Heizer) manages to get out before the collision, but his mother dies instantly upon impact. Actually, this depressed woman deliberately stopped her car on the tracks in order to commit suicide. But Davey doesn't want to die, and afterward he blames Tom and the train for his mother's death. Tom followed protocol in order not to derail the train, but nevertheless wasn't able to stop before the train hit the car. However this doesn't make sense to little Davey.

Davey is sent to a foster home and at the first chance he gets he runs away to locate the man who killed his mother. In the meantime, Tom and Megan are following different paths. She is set on doing everything she wanted to do but never did. She orders a piano and makes plans to go to San Francisco, finally. As she tells her friend, she knows she is dying, but she is going to go out on her terms. "Do not go gentle into that good night," she says, quoting a poem by Dylan Thomas, which goes on "Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light." While she refuses more chemo, Megan decides to fully enjoy what days she has left. "I am not afraid to die, but to think that I haven't lived" she says is what scares her.

When Davey locates the Starks, after their initial confrontation the three of them form a bond, and for a brief time Megan has the family she always wanted. For some reason Tom and Megan need Davey in their lives, and Davey needs them. He never really had a loving family either. This threesome shows what a little love can accomplish.

Alison Eastwood explains it was "important to me to find people who were as affected by the material as I had been, so I was thrilled when both Kevin and Marcia responded so strongly to the script. They were passionate about it from the start and brought more to their roles and to the film than I ever even imagined." And Bacon says, "I found the script to be very moving. At first, you might think it's a dark story, but it's really a love story between two people who are at the end, but are handling it in very different ways."

This is a heart wrenching and heartwarming story. It is powerful and emotional. The sadness is tempered by the love and feelings that exist between the characters.