A Walk on the Moon | Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen

A Walk on the Moon | Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen | a warm walk into memories and love

DVDs:

A Walk on the Moon

	A Walk on the Moon Diane Lane, Viggo Mortensen Miramax, 1999 average customer review:based on 112 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fabulous, beautiful movie!!!

One of the most beautiful, sexiest films I've ever seen. If you are a Baby Boomer as I am (I was 13 the summer of '69, you will also flip over the fantabulous soundtrack alone.

a warm walk into memories and love

I purchased this movie because Viggo Mortensen was in it. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of feeling this evoked in me for the female lead character, Diane Lane. She did a great job portraying a woman who was unfufilled with her life, and decided to take a chance on happiness outside of her marriage, even though it meant risking losing her family. It is set in the time of 'free love' and the first walk on moon, a time of change and new ideas, with widening generation gaps. This was a very warm, touching movie, that made me feel for both 'sides'. I would recommend this to any woman.

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A Thoughtful, Lovely Film

This tender film revisits the Summer of Woodstock (1969), as well as a slice of New York Jewish life from that era (the family summers in bungalow colonies in upstate New York). If you lived through the Sixties as a teen, just the background music may make you weep. Diane Lane is genuine and affecting as Pearl Kantlowitz, a Bronx housewife who married and had children too young, and at 32 is wondering if this is all life will ever hold for her. Pearl is going through a bad patch, exacerbated by seeing societal changes and possibilities erupting around her. Her rebellious 14-year-old-daughter, newly menstrual and blossoming sexually, is also going through a bad patch, which doesn't help matters, especially as Pearl can see that her daughter will likely have wider horizons than she herself did. Pearl's loving, but somewhat stolid husband, Marty, sympathetically played by Liev Schreiber, is either unable or unwilling to address her increasingly urgent needs. He too is trapped by their humdrum lives and early parenthood. As was typical of the era, husbands went back to the city during the week and came back on the weekend, and wives were left alone during the week to play mah-jong and cards, look after youngsters, and spend hours at the lakeside. This existence only throws Pearl's restless questioning into sharper relief.

Into this volatile emotional atmosphere steps a bohemian peddler called "The Blouse Man" (the film's original title), also sympathetically played by Viggo Mortensen. The Blouse Man (who actually has a name, Walker Jerome) visits the bungalow colony periodically, selling clothing and odds and ends to the women out of his bus. Walker's character could easily have degenerated into a sleazy drifter taking advantage of a disaffected housewife. Mortensen gives Walker gentle dimension - he is truly attracted to Pearl and falls in love with her, he is intelligent, and he honestly believes in the values of the emergent counterculture - he has lost a brother in Vietnam and has reasons for distrusting the establishment. Walker is very much the "other" - a kind of Golden Shaygetz (gentile man in Yiddish), blonde and extraordinarily handsome, who couldn't present more of a contrast to Pearl's nice but dull Jewish husband. Mortensen handles this role with sensitivity - he does not pursue Pearl, it is she who makes the first move toward him, and he leaves her to set the pace of the affair. The scene in which Walker and Pearl first have sex in the back of his bus is both erotic and touching.

Complicating matters is the presence of Pearl's mother-in-law, who lives with the family, but with whom Pearl has an affectionate, not adversarial relationship. Played by Tovah Feldshuh, the mother-in-law (something of a local psychic who gives card- and tea-leaf readings) discerns the relationship between Pearl and Walker, and reveals it to Marty during the week by telephone, telling him to "get your tuchas up here no matter what you gotta do". Whether she was right to interfere, the individual viewer may decide, but she precipitates a crisis in which Pearl and Marty must make decisions about their lives.

Some may find the tie-up here a bit too pat - but this really is a charming film, well-produced with attention to period detail, including the music (e.g., Richie Havens, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin). You can tell that the writers felt real affection for the characters, exposing their foibles and errors in a detached yet humane way. The ensemble work is fine, and that includes the children, especially Anna Paquin as Allison, the sullen teenager. This is a quality film, worth repeat viewings and with many quietly memorable moments.

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