Moonlight Mile
Sad Songs Say So Much
The emotional center of Moonlight Mile is a jukebox, sitting in the back of a dingy bar in a small New England town in the early seventies. (The songs on the jukebox, we’re told, are a couple of years old, and a good thing, too.) It’s at the intersection of the lives of Joe and Bertie. Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) lives in the house of the parents of his fiancee, dead in a senseless shooting in a neighborhood diner. Bertie (Ellen Pompeo) runs the local post office and tends bar for her boyfriend, MIA in Vietnam. The best scene in the movie — one of the best scenes in a year with a lot of good scenes — has them meeting in front of the jukebox, playing a sad song, and dancing together awkwardly.
Moonlight Mile is like that; it’s as though the movie itself is a jukebox, playing every sad song in its repertoire. The movie begins with the funeral of Diane, Joe’s fiance. It immerses us in the details of the grieving process — how you wear your new shoes to the funeral, how you make sure the dog doesn’t throw up on the guests, how you have to deal with the fumbling but sincere sympathies of your friends. And later, how to deal with issues like who gets your daughter’s favorite leather coat, and who will have to testify at the trial of the killer. On top of that, the characters have to deconstruct all the wedding plans between Joe and Diane, which lend the movie an extra shot of poignancy. Moonlight Mile is the story of those left behind on their individual ice floes of grief, cold and isolated and lost, and whether any of them will make the journey back to the others. Sad songs are a necessary and vital part of the movie’s emotional landscape.
But it’s more than that. Moonlight Mile works in exactly the same way that sad songs do. Sad songs don’t work on their own; they only work if there’s a sadness in the listener for them to work on. Their primary power is evocative, in the way that they stimulate your own emotions. Or, as Trisha Yearwood put it:
I was standing by the counter
I was waiting for the change
When I heard that old familiar music start
It was like a lighted match
Had been tossed into my soul
It was like a dam had broken in my heart
After taking every detour
Getting lost and losing track
So that even if I wanted
I could not find my way back
After driving out the memory
Of the way things might have been
After I’d forgotten all about us
The song remembers when
Moonlight Mile is fortunate in having good guides through its journey through the landscape of loss and regret. Susan Sarandon and Dustin Hoffman are the parents, and they’re as good together as you might expect them to be. Sarandon here is hard-edged, flinty, and her daughter’s murder puts a wicked edge on her abundant sense of irony while depriving her of the ability to express herself any other way. Hoffman wears a mask that is sincere and ingratiating and annoying, which makes it all the more powerful when his real feelings are let out.
As you might expect, Jake Gyllenhaal is a little overwhelmed here, like a rookie pitcher at the All-Star Game going up against veteran professionals. He handles this by moping through most of the movie. He compliantly goes along with Hoffman on his caterpillar scheme to bring a Wal-Mart progenitor to their little Massachusetts town. He stays in their house, and keeps Sarandon company, gives her a fresh target now and again. On the rare occasions when he does manage to break through his seeming indifference, the contrast is extraordinary.
There’s one other contrast in the movie, but it underlies the weakness of Moonlight Mile. It’s the contrast between the relationship between Pompeo and Gyllenhaal and the rest of the film. The parts of Moonlight Mile that deal with sadness and desperation are handled effectively, and with much more originality than we expect from Hollywood. However, the romantic scenes — while effective at points — follow the familiar story arc we see all too often. There is the requisite Meet Cute, and the plot contrivance that leads to the Big Misunderstanding, and the breakup, and the romantic reconciliation. Moonlight Mile is so grounded in the reality of sadness that its reliance on a standard unreal Hollywood romantic plot is almost jarring. But Pompeo is so fetching in her role that it’s tempting to gloss over the predictability of her part of the story.
The story of Moonlight Mile is almost extraneous. The actions and reactions of the cast are both individual and universal; they’re particular to the characters but still reminiscent of how you and I might act in the same situation; how we react to loss and grief, how we try to reconstruct the past or rebuild the future. If you haven’t been there; Moonlight Mile is not something you’ll recognize. If you have been there, you’ll know the territory all too well.