MOONLIGHT MILE (2002)
Directed by Brad Silberling
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Susan Sarandon, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen
Pompeo
I've been waiting for Moonlight Mile to come out for a long time. I feel like I first saw a trailer for it at least a year ago. And that's the main reason I wanted to see the movie, besides the fact that it takes its title from a Stones song. At the end of the trailer, the best parts of "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" by Elton John play, and it's just beautiful, the way they use it. You can watch it here if you want. It was kind of stirring and triumphant and touching (I know I'm a dork for getting all this from a trailer) and really made me want to see the movie.
As it turns out, "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" isn't even in the movie, but that's okay. It takes place in the early '70s and has a great soundtrack, which is used very well and very appropriately. This time, rather than the stirring Elton John song, we get a similar use of "I'll Be Your Lover Too" by Van Morrison, and for their Elton John selection, they went with "Razorface" instead. There's also a touching "Moonlight Mile" scene, an unexpectedly bad-ass scene with "I Want to Take You Higher," and a funny little touch of Dave Edmunds' version of "I Hear You Knocking."
You probably don't really care about all this, so on to the plot and all that.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Joe, a young man whose fiancee has been murdered. He finds himself living with her grieving parents, JoJo (Susan Sarandon) and Ben (Dustin Hoffman), who cling to him as the last living reminder of their daughter. Ben ropes Joe into going into the commercial real estate business with him, and Joe does so out of a mixture of guilt and ennui. A few days after his fiancee's death, he meets a girl named Birdie, who's also mourning a loss. It seems that Birdie and Joe might be just the things to make each other feel better. But Joe's got a secret that could mess the whole thing up.
Susan Sarandon, as JoJo, has the best lines in the movie. She's hilarious, and I think very realistically witty and screwed up at the same time. Dustin Hoffman's Ben is being compared to two of his most famous characters, Benjamin from The Graduate and Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. He's really closer to Willy Loman. He's completely, totally gone when he loses his daughter, filled with guilt and regret and all the other stuff. His acting iss completely understated and quiet, while Sarandon lets it all hang out. Gyllenhaal is the place to rest. His acting is mostly in his big ol' eyes, which he rolls and makes even bigger and uses to make everyone fall in love with him. He's really touching as a guy who wants to help, but doesn't really know what he wants for himself or how to get it.
And then there's Birdie. Cute, freckled, spunky, a little eccentric. She works at the post office, which I found very unlikely, but anyway, and at night she tends bar. She's the first person (other than JoJo and Ben) who's able to just be honest with Joe about the loss and the sorrow and all that. And of course since Joe's keeping a secret from JoJo and Ben, his relationship with them isn't really honest at all.
And that's the point of the movie, in the end. Honesty, being true to yourself and to the people you love. The way it all comes out is slightly sappy, not to mention slightly Perry Mason, but it's forgivable, because the rest of the movie avoided that kind of sentimentality and Hallmark stuff completely.
In my review of The Banger Sisters and Me Without You, I talked about how my favorite kind of movie ending is the kind that's happy but happy in a real-life way. My second favorite is the one that stirs you, maybe makes you cry through a smile, plays some great music, ties everything up, and sends you on your way. That's how Moonlight Mile ended. I left it feeling happy to be driving home in the sunshine with the radio on.
Jennifer Rae Atkins
October 4, 2002