In Rails & Ties, the main character is a man who drives trains for a living. The patent obviousness of the title should give you an idea of the lack of subtlety involved in all aspects of this film, which is all about sad people who come together in convoluted ways so that they can be sad together in sad, dreary rooms while sad acoustic guitar music plays. Watching it feels a little like being slowly smothered by a soft pillow, while your killer won't shut up about his inability to share his feelings.

In the movie, Tom Stark (Kevin Bacon) is the saddest of all, since (a) his wife is in the final stages of cancer, and (b) he hit a car with his train and killed a woman. His wife, Megan (Marcia Gay Harden) is also sad, mostly because she has cancer, but also because Tom's depressed and won't talk to her. The other sad person is nine-year-old Davey (Miles Heizer), whose suicidal mother parked her car on the railroad tracks and got squished. Naturally, Davey blames Tom. And, because this is that sort of a movie, he seeks out Tom and Megan, who argue whether they should let him stay with them. Unsurprisingly, Megan wins because, hey, cancer. Then everyone starts getting in touch with their feelings.

Bacon and Harden are good actors, and it's easy to see why they'd be attracted to these roles. Actors love parts where they get to lie in bed dying -- probably because they get to spend days at a time off their feet, except for trips to the craft services table -- or where they get to act all moody so that they appear serious and deep, which sometimes results in them winning awards. This movie allows both actors to be very quiet and serious, but then have one scene where they show a lot of Big Emotions that would make good clips for talk-show appearances. Unfortunately for us, the audience, the experience of watching withdrawn characters is that there's not a lot for us to see, since they're internalizing everything. So what usually happens is that other characters tell them what they're feeling so that we know what's going on.

For example, Tom's problem is that everything is dying around him and he can't deal with it. As viewers, we ought to be able to figure this out for ourselves. But just in case we can't, his train-driving partner, Otis (Eugene Byrd) tells him, "You know what your problem is? Everything is dying around you and you can't deal with it." See? Now we know what Tom is feeling. For good measure, Otis continues with, "At least I'm alive. You're dead inside, and everyone around you knows it!" Thank you, Otis. Without you, we might have just thought that Tom had really bad gas.

Rails & Ties was written by Micky Levy, whose IMDB page lists one acting credit in the film Vampire Time Traveller and another one as the character "Queen Freak" in the direct-to-video movie Cannibal Detour. Her background is quite interesting -- she was born and raised in Israel and learned to speak English when she moved to the U.S. at age 17. If this screenplay was very good, it would be easy to imagine Levy getting a huge Diablo Cody-style media bump (although it would help if she blogged and had a racy past, perhaps as a hooker) resulting in several months of media coverage and a badly-written regular feature in a major publication.

But the screenplay isn't very good. For starters, Levy's characters are given to pronouncements that sound nothing like the way people actually speak to each other. Poor, sad, cancer-stricken Megan, saddled with a grumpy husband who won't give her comfort, ought to smack the guy upside the head and say, "Hey, I need you to hug me and make soup." Instead, she merely looks thoughtful and says, "You're like sand, Tom. The harder I try to hold onto you, the faster you slip through my fingers." This is the sort of line that looks good on the page but sounds utterly ridiculous when spoken aloud, even by an actress as skillful as Harden. And if you've ever been married, well, it's positively laughable. Seriously -- say that to your spouse this evening, and see what sort of response you get. It'll probably be something along the lines of, "Um, are you drunk?"

Additionally, the story itself is plodding and manipulative, with a draggy first third, and a middle that has characters doing things simply to get them into place for the final act. To be fair, first-time director Alison Eastwood, daughter of Clint, does a serviceable job of making what is, in effect, a modern version of the classic 1950s "weepies" that were directed with considerably more style by the likes of Douglas Sirk. Today, of course, these movies are produced almost exclusively for the Lifetime network and, with different casting -- say, Dermot Mulroney and Angie Harmon instead of Bacon and Harden -- one could see this entire movie fitting perfectly over there without any other changes.

Of course, if you actually like overwrought dramas with painfully on-the-nose dialogue, in which everyone speaks in hushed tones while the soundtrack pounds home the melodrama with sad acoustic guitar ... hey, this is right up your alley. Go forth into that good night, friend. But if you feel like sticking your head in an oven when it's over, don't say that you weren't warned.

The DVD from Warner Bros. is a slight affair, offering up a visually lovely transfer of the film with excellent sound and almost nothing else. There are some deleted scenes, a couple of which are quite good, if only because of Bacon's acting. A commentary track might have been interesting, especially given that this film is the first screenplay and first directorial effort by two women, but Warner's didn't see fit to provide one.

****

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