Not quite movie of the week
It’s that old adultery theme again. It has become as much of a clich and a formula as most of the rest of Hollywood’s stock-in- trade, predictably playing out the conflict between the demands of family and the lure of freedom (or just excitement). And, as if influenced by all those old readings of Shakespeare’s plays, there is the mandatory movement towards the restoration of order – that is, the family wins.
A Walk on the Moon is the directorial debut of actor Tony Goldwyn (the voice of Disney’s Tarzan, as well as, oddly enough, Neil Armstrong in a TV series last year). It starts out well, with the Kantrowitz family – mom, pop, granny, two kids – on their way to a summer holiday village, one depicted with what feels like well-observed historical accuracy and considerable wry humour. Soon the Kantrowitzes have settled in there, though Dad (Liev Schreiber) has to keep rushing home during the week to keep doing his job as a television repairman. His skills will be very much in demand as the first moon landing looms.
For this is 1969, with the United States caught between conservative post-war stability and the wild appeal of hippiedom. Indeed, that’s the very tension suffered by Pearl Kantrowitz (Diane Lane), or at least that tension is symbolic of her dilemma. Married young and pregnant, she yearns for something she’s sure she missed – her youth, perhaps. “Sometimes,” she says, “I wish I was a whole ‘nother person.” So she falls for the charms of the “blouse man”, a travelling dress salesman (Viggo Mortensen) who periodically visits the holiday village to retail his wares from an old bus.
He’s free and easy, seductive and sideburned, which shows that he’s a bit of a hippie. On the soundtrack, someone is singing, perhaps a bit obviously, “He has kissed her with his freedom”.
At the same time, daughter Alison (Anna Paquin) is discovering her own adolescent yearnings, feeling out the same area of life as that which troubles her mother, from the other end, as it were. Their parallel stories are neatly contrasted, drawing out the lesson that what seems like sweet freedom now may lead to later bondage. Both mother and daughter will test the limits of that freedom at the nearby Woodstock festival, a paradoxical symbol of America’s own longing for a new way of life.
But the movie cannot resolve itself except in a traditional, well-worn fashion, and soon it is bordering on soap opera and squeezing an ostensibly happy ending out of its dramatic materials. The earlier humour is dissipated in overplayed trauma and sentiment; tonally, it begins to feel a tad righteous. Lane is good, Paquin is especially good, and so is granny (Tovah Feldshuh), but Pamela Gray’s script offers little in the way of fresh conclusions. Perhaps there are no fresh conclusions to be had in this kind of story.
I’m beginning to think that unless film- makers have something new to say about adultery, they should just leave it to Woody Allen.