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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 48480
Released: June 17, 2008 |
| Our Price: $8.65 |
| Used Price: $0.74 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden give soaring performances in Rails & Ties, director Alison Eastwood’s moving tale of people in crisis and emotions at the brink. Bacon plays Tom Stark, a train engineer unable to face his wife’s (Harden) illness. Then a terrifying railway collision leaves a little boy orphaned. Tom takes the boy into his home and – step by step, strength by strength – learns how to bond with the wife he adores by opening his heart to a boy who needs the security of a devoted family.
Description of Rails and Ties:
Alison Eastwood (Clint's daughter) makes an impressive directorial debut with the moving Rails & Ties, an unusual drama about the redemption of three tragic characters through a makeshift family. Kevin Bacon stars as Tom, a locomotive engineer whose distraction over his wife’s terminal cancer brings doubts about his judgment when he runs into a suicidal woman who parks her car on train tracks. Forced to take time off, Tom confronts his growing distance from Megan (Marcia Gay Harden), who has little time left and wants him, despite his resistance, to be with her. Everything changes when Davey (Miles Heizer), the young son of the dead woman, flees from an abusive foster home and finds his way to Tom, where a confrontation leads to a desperate connection between the boy and childless Megan and Tom. Eastwood’s handsome and tender film explores the reawakening of hope under the shadow of death, without slipping into bathos, distracting viewers with the obvious implausibility of the situation, or allowing attention to drift during one or two of screenwriter Micky Levy’s weaker scenes. Harden and Bacon (whose increasingly grizzled look and laconic performance here recall the elder Eastwood) are very good as would-be parents who find love again at the 11th hour. --Tom Keogh
Rails and Ties Reviews:
unorthodox and moving indie drama 
2009-12-15 - As "Rails and Ties" opens, locomotive engineer Tom Stark (Kevin Bacon) is having the kind of day most of us could not imagine having to face even in our worst nightmare; his 41-year-old wife, Megan (Marcia Gay Harden), has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a mentally ill young mother has committed suicide by parking her car directly in the path of the train he is conducting. As is customary in such cases, Tom is put on temporary suspension pending an investigation of the crash. He also has to come to terms with the imminent loss of his wife, who laments the fact that the couple never had a child and that she will die without ever having truly lived. Meanwhile, the dead woman's 11-year-old son, Davey (Miles Heizer), who has miraculously escaped the tragedy (it was intended as a murder/suicide), seeks Tom out to confront him about running over his mother, but stays to find a surrogate family of sorts with Tom and Megan - with all the messy legal ramifications that that entails.
Needless to say, given the plot as outlined above, "Rails and Ties" isn't exactly designed to be a passel of upbeat fun. Still, those with a taste for serious, thoughtful, humanistic dramas will find much to cherish in this film. The Micky Levy screenplay focuses, primarily, on the complex marital relationship of Tom and Megan, as they struggle with why Tom has never been able to fully commit himself to either the marriage or the prospect of being a father.
Given all the various tragic elements that meet up in this single drama, the movie could easily have become awash in sentimentality and bathos. Instead, the subtlety and restraint of Alison Eastwood's direction, along with the richly understated performances (especially by Harden), keep the suds from rising too much to the surface. The result is a movie that deals authentically and truthfully with some highly unorthodox and rather touchy subject matter. "Rails and Ties" may pluck on the heartstrings a little too freely at times, but the tears and throat lumps it elicits are, for the most part, honestly earned.
Hope! 
2009-10-26 - I had to watch this movie twice to fully understand everything that just happened. A very emotional movie. Full of moving details about two people suffering and how something as painful as dying from cancer and losing your mate can be a vehicle for loving someone's child that you were responsible for the death of their parent. Very moving story and I love Kevin and Marcia. Just buy it and watch it.
Excellent
2009-09-03 - Very Compelling movie with excellent acting by 2 lead stars and others. Covering a multitude of human relationship and their inherant problems. The triumph of the human spirit is handled very well. My wife says its a 3 tissue movie
Railed 
2009-05-24 - The deal breaker for this film is that at no point was the plot plausible. Even that I can suspend if the characterization and emotion evoked by flawless chemistry is in place. Neither was. The story should have been compelling and made me care. Instead I found myself doubting the conflict, thus, not caring about its resolution. I do have high hopes of Eastwood's future films, however.
Rails and Ties
2009-04-11 - One of Kevin's and Marcia's finest, touching, moving and emotional films. This is simply a great film.
jimmy
