The directorial debut of actress Alison Eastwood, Rails and Ties is like one big mash-up of the entire melodrama genre and proof of one of the more unbending rules in the history of film - the script is the foundation on which everything else must be built. Just look at the creative line-up behind the film. Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden are two of the best working actors today and consistently do excellent work in every film they're in. Eastwood, while a neophyte director, proves she has some chops and handles the material relatively well. The film's fatal flaw, however, is Micky Levy's heavy-handed script which completely derails Eastwood's debut. This train is so overcrowded with wild emotions, crazy coincidences, and stifling melodrama that it can't possibly go anywhere, despite the best efforts of Eastwood and her cast.

Rails and Ties opens with a series of tragedies and doesn't get much brighter from there. We meet Tom and Megan Stark (Bacon & Harden), two people trapped in the middle of one of life's all-too-common tragedies - dealing with cancer. Megan's breast cancer has returned, and her prognosis isn't good. Tom is distant and cold, choosing to ignore the emotions that must be welling up inside of him and pulling away from Megan in her final days. One day, while train conductor Tom is behind the wheel, a suicidal woman drives onto the track with her child still in the car. The child, Davey (Miles Heizer), escapes unharmed, but Tom's train kills the woman. Through a series of shocking coincidences, Davey comes into the lives of Megan and Tom, and the healing begins.

It's not a bad idea for a movie - you have a woman dying against her will and a woman who takes her own life. The film is about the men, Tom and Davey, affected by those two extremes, but the screenplay just wallows in the scenario's overwrought emotions, to the point that they don't ever ring true. Rails and Ties should be emotionally draining, but it never hits you in the heart because every line and movement is just bathed in Steel Magnolia-level melodrama. You'll practically be begging for just one moment with Tom, Megan, and Davey that feels realistic. Everything about the movie is designed to extract the maximum number of emotions (and, ideally, tears) from its audience. It's manipulation, not drama, and, new as she is, Eastwood should know the difference.

The biggest tragedy of Rails and Ties is who it drags down with it. The fact that Kevin Bacon has never been nominated for an Oscar should be an annual shame, and Marcia Gay Harden has been consistently brilliant across her long career. But try as they may, they can't save Rails and Ties. Without them, the film would have just been a Lifetime TV movie-of-the-week weeper, and it's almost worse to see two actors of this caliber struggle against the clichés of the script they've been saddled with. Everyone involved, including Eastwood, will move on to bigger and better things and leave this series of unfortunate events behind on the tracks, waiting for a midnight train to put it out of its considerable misery. You should too.