Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are reuniting on the big-screen, but what makes the collaboration especially exciting is the fact that they are joining forces for Ryan’s directorial debut, “Ithaca.” A trailer has dropped for the drama, which centers on Homer (Alex Neustaedter, “Colony”), a teenage boy who works as a telegram messenger to help support his financially-strapped family when his older brother (Jack Quaid, “The Hunger Games,” and Ryan’s real-life son) goes to fight in WWII.
As the title would suggest, the film takes place primarily in Ithaca, New York. Ryan plays the boys’ mother — a widow. Hanks takes on the role of their late father, seemingly appearing in the form of flashbacks.
The coming-of-age story is based on William Saroyan’s 1943 novel “The Human Comedy.” In the trailer, we see Homer question whether war is senseless. His mother explains, “You are becoming aware of a world in which you’ve been a child. There will always be pain in this world … but a good man will seek to take the pain out of things.”
“I think [the story] speaks to the complicated things happening [in the world], in the sense of community and cultivation of an individual’s integrity — what Saroyan believes are important antidotes,” Ryan told Entertainment Weekly of the film’s inspiration. She added, “Hopefully ‘Ithaca’ is about how fierce and frail life really is.”
“Ithaca” premiered at the 2015 Middleburg Film Festival and opens in limited release on September 9.
