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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SERIOUS MOONLIGHT Serious Moonlight is a small indie that has all the ingredients of a typical Hollywood Meg Ryan romantic comedy from the 1990s—including Meg Ryan. Here she’s the workaholic corporate lawyer Louise, whose decade-old neglected marriage has only produced a lovely country home. On her to-do list for an atypical long weekend is to rekindle conjugal relations, but the cottage has surprisingly already been set up for a cozy romantic rendezvous. Too bad her husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) didn’t light candles and scatter all those rose petals for her. He was instead setting the scene for a getaway with his new love, his 24-year-old mistress. Louise instinctively reacts to insure that he will hear her case for continuing their marriage—she knocks him out and duct tapes Ian to the toilet. It’s a complicated set-up in order for her to coolly respond to her competition, Sara (Kristen Bell), when she arrives looking for Ian: “He’s tied up at the moment.” That noisy bathroom gets more crowded when the young guy who cuts their lawn, Todd (Justin Long, meaner than his usual slacker comic relief), arrives to rob and ransack the house, and he duct tapes the women in the john as well. There are dark comic possibilities in such an extreme situation, but Serious Moonlight doesn’t go far enough as either sexy farce, like Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, or black comedy, like Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul. Instead, there’s the tired sitcom clichés of slapping, vomiting, flopping goldfish, and a final plot twist that incongruously goes for sweet instead of twisted.
It’s laudatory that such an experienced cast would gather
to embody a script by the late Adrienne Shelley under the debut helm of
Cheryl Hines, who displayed her comic timing in Shelley’s charming
Waitress.
But the familiarity of the actors works
against the comedy because they have played such roles before. That the
lovers plan to sneak off to Paris only serves as reminder of
Lawrence Kasdan’s
French Kiss with Ryan, Hutton, and a thief, among other such
films.
Bell showed sassy promise in
the TV series Veronica Mars, a cult fave, so it’s been
disappointing that she too has taken the route of lame rom coms that
lack the spark of the best of the Meg Ryan genre.
Nora Lee Mandel
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