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| Directed by Tony Goldwyn; Starring Diane Lane, Viggo Mortenson, Liev Schreiber, Anna Paquin, Tovah Feldshuh, Bobby Boriello, and Victoria Barkoff |
If you thought Tony Goldwyn couldn’t act, wait till you see him direct. A Walk on the Moon is a sure-fire Spring movie if I’ve ever seen one. The story seems like its been done fifteen different times in the last year, just different parts of it. I’ve had about enough of the remember the good old days movies set in the late sixties-early seventies. In fact I’ve had enough of movies just dumb enough to try to make Woodstock interesting to watch again.
It was the summer of love (bet you haven’t heard that one before), 1969 in a small town of Woodstock. The hippies all get together and enjoy themselves, a little too tempting for the heroine of this feature. Diane Lane plays a Jewish mother who, with family in tow, heads to their annual summer trip to a resort in the Catskills. The husband (played effectively by Liev Schreiber) must commute to and from work every weekend, leaving his poor wife to set around talking to her friends and mother-in-law. This mother-in-law (Feldshuh) could be the most annoying maternal character in film history. She might have seemed even worse if it was not for the highly annoying Lane character. While in this resort (how they can afford it, we’re never told), the daughter (Paquin) has her first relationship with a boy and Lane gives up all and has an affair with the traveling blouse salesman (Mortenson). The film lingers on for what seemed like the duration of the first cut of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.
The direction seems like it has no real place to go. At times it seems like Goldwyn’s calling may very well be in the porn directing business (the waterfall scene was a little out of place, for heaven’s sakes). The only saving graces to the entire film are two actors: Paquin and Schreiber. Paquin seems to be headed to quite an interesting career as she proves that she was much more than just a fluke in The Piano (also see the highly underrated Hurlyburly). I’ve liked Schreiber since seeing him in The Daytrippers, then his performance in Scream 2 (eight times) further placed him on my list of actors to keep a close eye on. Now if the fun of Twin Dragons had the two actors from A Walk on the Moon playing the characters from Tango, we might just have an enjoyable film.
