As the daughter of Clint Eastwood, Alison Eastwood surely possesses the genetic code for great filmmaking. The chip off the old block makes her directorial debut in 2007's Rails & Ties, but unfortunately the occasionally affecting melodrama has the misfortune of being borderline ridiculous.

You can't blame the rock-solid cast. Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden (both of whom appeared in Daddy Clint's Mystic River) star as Tom and Megan Stark. The middle-class couple is in quiet agony. She is slowly dying from breast cancer, while taciturn Tom avoids confronting the heartache of the situation by losing himself in his work as a train engineer. But the walls between them are shattered one afternoon when Tom's passenger train hits a suicidal woman who has parked her car at a railroad crossing.

The dead woman's 11-year-old son, Davey (Miles Heizer) witnessed the accident, and he blames Tom for not slowing down. Quickly placed in the care of an overly strict foster parent, the boy takes off to track down and confront Tom.

He does so, but is soon assuaged when Tom explains he couldn't have stopped the train without risking the lives of the passengers on board. Still, the boy isn't done with the childless couple. Despite Tom's understandable misgivings, a bond develops between the woman who yearns for a child and the boy who has just lost his mother. As Tom awaits a hearing to determine whether he was at fault in Davey's mother's death, the Starks wind up playing house with the boy.

Screenwriter Micky Levvy is unencumbered by the sheer absurdity of the premise. As happenstance has it, Davey is a train enthusiast; he even carries around a toy locomotive that belonged to the father he never knew.

Bacon and Harden give customarily accomplished performances. Both actors are so natural and understated, they almost -- almost -- make one forget that the Starks would have to be stark-raving mad to shelter a runaway whose sole parent was killed by Tom's train. Why does Kevin Bacon seemingly take on every role offered to him? Is he determined to make "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" the world's easiest game?

Alison Eastwood demonstrates an aptitude for working with actors, but Levy's Lifetime-styled script abounds with characters doing things that defy the most basic commonsense. When the railroad line office phones Megan to tell her that her husband has been in an accident, why does Megan's neighbor answer the phone and then neglect to even hand the phone over to Megan? Why does no character seem able to censor themselves from the most indulgently mean-spirited observations ("Everything is dying around you," snipes Tom's work buddy).

How can Davey be so convinced that Tom is responsible for his mom's death that he flees foster care to track the guy down, only to be allayed with a quick reference to a book of railway regulations? And why would a child welfare worker turn a blind eye to a situation that would strike a casual observer as a case of child abduction? Rails & Ties is a well-intentioned drama, but such outlandishness send the movie off its tracks early on.

Presented in anamorphic widescreen 2.35:1, the DVD is good picture quality, with rich shadings and generally solid details. Very slight aliasing is in a few scenes.

The dialogue-heavy film doesn't offer much of a workout for the Dolby Digital 5.1 track. Indeed, the disc suffers from an inconsistency in volume. Optional subtitles are in Spanish, French and English for the hearing-impaired.

Four additional (and nonanamorphic) scenes clock in just shy of eight minutes. They can only be viewed as a whole. All were wisely cut, including a ludicrous scene in which Davey is befriended by a fellow runaway at a train station.

Rails & Ties boasts strong performances from Bacon, Harden and child actor Heizer, but the three are far better than the material with which they are saddled.