Building Tension, Suspense on Reservation Road
Keep Your Audience Guessing With Character Conflict
An engaging story requires more than simple words on paper. To hold your audience’s attention, you must know how to manipulate their emotions, and involve them in the lives of your characters. If you can get the audience to care about one of your characters, you’re a leg up on most writers.
Two? Even better.
You must plot characters that are flesh-and-blood real.
In the Reservation Road movie, based on a novel by John Burnham Schwartz, three very different points of view take center stage, presenting to the audience hard choices they must make on the way to a soul-searching conclusion. Revenge, guilt, and holding things together in the face of tragedy, are three common themes you’ll find throughout.
These themes are isolated in the souls of three characters: Ethan Learner (Joaquin Phoenix), Grace Learner (Jennifer Connelly), and Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), whose lives intersect after a heartbreaking accident changes each forever.
Ethan Learner and Revenge
What motivates your plot characters?
In Reservation Road, Ethan Learner is driven by revenge, a very base feeling viewers can instantly relate to. Who hasn’t felt the need to get back at someone for a wrong gone unpunished? Phoenix’s Ethan feels this fantasy more than most. A chance encounter with a careless SUV-driver leaves his only son dead, the driver unidentified, and his family reeling from the event.
Ethan has always been an understanding father and husband -- a level-headed college professor in his everyday life -- until he discovers that even in the unlikely event of an arrest, the hit-and-run driver will most likely get a pathetic ten years for his crime.
This isn’t good enough.
Ethan sets out to find the person responsible, and as his frustration builds, he becomes more and more willing to throw away what he does have left for a chance at vengeance.
Dwight Arno – Guilt and the Courage of Taking Responsibility
While Ethan’s desire for revenge is a feeling everyone can relate to, so, too, is his target’s motivation.
Ethan doesn’t know it at first, but the one he seeks is Dwight Arno, a man successful in his career but failing at life. Arno’s wife always accuses him of never taking responsibility for his actions. One night on Reservation Road, he proves her right, and spends the rest of the film living with a growing sense of guilt and regret.
Burnham Schwartz could have written a much less interesting novel, which would have made for an even less interesting film, had he not spent the time needed to flesh out Arno’s character into the three-dimensionally sympathetic mess that he is.
Arno is a decent man, who loves his son, but he’s always been so afraid of losing what he has that he suppresses the courage it takes to do the right thing, even if it means living with some unwanted consequences.
As a result Reservation Road becomes as much about Arno’s plight as Ethan’s, and gives the audience two plot characters with whom they can solidly relate to and trust in as time ticks away to their inevitable confrontation.
Grace Learner – Strength and Determination in the Face of Tragedy
The moral compass of the film, Grace Learner is the intermediary between the other two characters. She carries with her the guilt and rage over her son’s death, but she also deals with it in a more admirable way, giving both her husband and Arno a solid footing of morality they can aspire to.
Where her husband sees vengeance, she sees her young daughter that still needs, and deserves, a full life. In her husband, she sees a once admirable man reduced to the primal urge for revenge that too often causes more destruction than the inciting incident that spawns such a need in the first place.
And in her decision to move past the tragedy and create a way for her family to heal and survive, she shows strength and courage that Arno, the man who took her son from her, longs to have.
Final Thoughts
In Grace the audience sees the result they want from Ethan and Arno, two understandably grieved yet morally weaker characters, they have grown to care about. Burnham Schwartz succeeds at building tension by:
- Creating character conflict between two relatable plot characters the audience grows to care about.
- Involving another character as intermediary – a fleshed-out woman, who is doing the only thing that can be done in this situation…moving on and trying her best to hold things together for her other child, her husband, and herself.
- Working Ethan and Arno towards a confrontation that will ultimately show the audience whether they have risen to Grace’s level of understanding by the film’s conclusion, or towards another tragic circumstance that causes greater suffering.
Visit IMDB to read more about the Reservation Road movie.
For a great lesson plan on teaching conflict through the use of comparison and contrast essays, visit Read, Write, Think.
Joaquin Phoenix in Reservation Road
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