**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter
written and directed by Brad Silberling
by Walter Chaw There is a delicacy to the dusk of the early-Seventies, poised as those years were on the lip of paranoia and disquiet as the psychic scars of the Sixties assassinations, Watergate, and Vietnam worked like rough puberty on an infant nation's whored naiveté. Capturing that space in the disintegration of individuals, traditions, hopes, faiths, is something best left in the hands of casualties of war (Tim O'Brien) and outsider perspectives (Ang Lee and his The Ice Storm). That Brad Silberling, writer-director of Moonlight Mile, appears to be making the death-by-stalker of his actress fiancé Rebecca Schaeffer the metaphor for that twilight time is cause for some concern.
Joe's (Jake Gyllenhaal) wife-to-be has been murdered in a random shooting, just days after the couple's return to her small hometown, where they had planned to tell her parents, Ben and Jojo Floss (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), that the blessed day was off. Trapped by obligation and a collective grief that hangs like a pall over the shocked hamlet, Joe becomes the Flosses' ironic surrogate child–hard-sold commercial real estate like Joe's soul brother Benjamin Braddock was plastics, the boozy mother of the beloved also looks upon him with lust, albeit of a different kind.
Where The Graduate held true to the dyspeptic malaise of another generational rift (or the same one at an earlier stage), Moonlight Mile allows its protagonist the passive slouch of a Gen-X'er–an essential thematic difference underscored by Joe's weary acceptance of his fate while a road to the unknown future in its epilogue stretches on with a hopeful Van Morrison tune instead of a mordant Simon & Garfunkel one. The Graduate is a film that attacks precepts of traditional order and Moonlight Mile is a film of an individual's self-discovery; that the picture sets itself in the morass of the first half of the 1970s (complete with laden references to Vietnam), a tone of individual uplift is out of place, disingenuous, and ultimately off-putting.
As quirky love-interest and war-widow Bertie, relative newcomer Ellen Pompeo is simply fantastic. Her role is a thankless one, with the lion's share of dramatic possibilities given over to Gyllenhaal, but she manages to avoid cliché while offering new appreciation for the smoky sexuality of jukeboxes and roadhouse diners. That Bertie is so intoxicating a fulcrum and spiritual focal point damns Moonlight Mile to a comparison to Almost Famous (and Pompeo resembles Kate Hudson's Penny Lane in more than just appearance) as a document of the fate of a smart kid thrust into an exciting new world populated by wounded young fatales and Yeats's lost children.
Despite its lofty aspirations, Moonlight Mile is too personal to function particularly well as a societal statement and too tonally scattered to function as a deft personal digest of grief, locating itself in quality and theme somewhere between the lows of Crowe's (Almost Famous) faux-nostalgia and the highs of Nichols's (The Graduate) national coming-of-age. With great performances all around from its tempered and well-heeled cast and a good soundtrack that again falls between the greatest hits valleys of Crowe and the carefully modulated peaks of Nichols, Moonlight Mile is an inconsequential if effective little drama that commits its one fatal mistake by attempting to turn a personal tragedy into a metaphor for the blue zeitgeist of an entire decade. Without that gaffe, the picture would have been a small gem–with it, Moonlight Mile loses much of its poignancy in the transparency of its stolen gravity. Originally published: October 4, 2002.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Featuring two great commentary tracks, Touchstone's DVD release of Moonlight Mile makes catching up with the little-seen film an absolute pleasure. Director Brad Silberling goes it alone in the first; never addressing Rebecca Schaeffer by name (only "my girlfriend"), Silberling avoids getting too personal but still manages to paint a thorough portrait of the screenplay's germination and its "journey" (Silberling's favourite word, it would seem) through five years in the drawer and in and out of the greenlight stage at three separate studios. Their dynamic that of wise sensei and hotshot rookie, respectively, Hoffman and Gyllenhaal bring a great deal of chemistry to the table when they join Silberling for the second yakker, with a self-deprecating Hoffman sincerely interested in distinguishing the fictitious from the autobiographical in questions addressed to Silberling, who remains humbled that his cast invested so much passion in the project.
Ten deleted scenes–nine with optional commentary from Silberling (the tenth and final is a montage of scrap footage)–show the bloated movie that almost was. In the most startling omission, we learn that dancing to "Moonlight Mile" with the nearest man is a nightly ritual for Bertie. (Ellen Pompeo, by the way, is criminally lovely.) A J.M. Kenny featurette ("Moonlight Mile: Journey to the Screen" (22 mins.)) that appears to have been prepared for commercial television is exactly what we've come to expect not from Kenny, but "Spotlight on Location"-type makings-of: informative in the strictest sense. And it's even more evasive about the roots of Moonlight Mile than Silberling is in his yak-track(s).
As for the audio-visual presentation, the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer has clarity without edginess, but shadow detail isn't exceptionally strong. There's a nighttime shot of a barren street at one point in which every etch of glass on a traffic light is visible, yet darker areas of that image cause eyestrain. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix lacks bluster, though because this is a dialogue-driven movie and not for any deficiencies in the recording. The song selections (such '70s favourites as Sly & the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher") sound as good as they ever have.
117 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Touchstone
