MBunge This is a movie made in the 1990s about the 1960s with the moral obtuseness of the 1970s and the cookie-cutter, generic storytelling of the 1980s.The Kantrowitzes are a working class Jewish family spending their summer at a Catskills resort during the time of the first Moon landing. They don't have much money, so Marty (Liev Schreiber) has to go back to work during the week while his wife, children and his mother spend their days in a tiny bungalow in a lakeside campsite. His wife Pearl (Diane Lane) is bored, unsatisfied and feels like life has passed her by. We know this because Pearl repeatedly tells people that. Then she meets Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), a handsome man in a bus who stops by the resort to sell blouses to all the Jewish ladies. Pearl begins a torrid affair with the free-spirited Walker, which culminates in some sort of weird emotional breakdown at the Woodstock concert. But when her family discovers Pearl's secret, she is faced with losing a life that Pearl realizes she really loves. There's also some stuff about young Alison Kantrowitz (Anna Paquin) becoming a woman that summer, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point other than giving Anna Paquin something to do.This story isn't exactly original, but the actors all do a good job and there was certainly the potential for something worthwhile here. It never really amounts to anything, though, for two reasons.Firstly, for a story that is fundamentally about betrayal, none of the folks who are betrayed ever get that upset. When Pearl's mother-in-law (Tovah Feldshuh) finds out about the affair, she's angry with Pearl for about 15 seconds. When Alison finds out, she's angry with her mother for almost a minute. When Marty finds outs, he's angry for maybe 5 minutes at most. When the film gets to the part about adultery tearing Kantrowitzes apart, it studiously avoids letting any of the characters feel pained for any significant length of time. Earlier on, when the movie is supposed to be about the illicit romance of the affair, Pearl doesn't seem like a desperately unhappy woman reaching out for something to fill the void in her heart. She seems like an apathetically disinterested woman who gets bored easily. So, we're presented with a woman who doesn't seem to have a good reason to commit adultery and a family that doesn't seem to mind that much when she does.A Walk On The Moon refuses to let any of these characters be the bad guy. Pearl isn't the bad guy, Marty isn't, the mother-in-law isn't, even Walker Jerome isn't allowed to be a bad person. Not making people out to be "the bad guy" might be a wonderful way to go through life, but it's a terrible way to tell a story. When you're watching this film you should either want Pearl to stay with her family or run away with Walker, but the movie refuses to let you feel that strongly either way. I think it's an attempt to reflect the moral and social confusion of the 60s, but an ethically and thematically confusing movie is usually not that entertaining.The other problem with A Walk On The Moon is that it is probably the WASPiest film about Jews you'll ever watch. There's a few scattered moments of ethnic sentiment and culture, but this story could have been about Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Atheists or what have you. These filmmakers may have been trying to say something about the universality of this situation, but why give it a distinctly ethnic background in the first place? It feels a little bit like The Cosby Show, where these characters are Jews but there's nothing particularly Jewish about them.If you rent this film, you will get some brief glimpses at Diane Lane's rack and Viggo Mortensen's butt. I'm pretty sure you can find those things in better movies than this.

moviedude1 When a family spends the summer of '69 in the Catskills, both mother and daughter find new love interests. Diane Lane stars as a wife and mother who turns to the "blouse man" for affection when her husband can't get out of the city and spend any time with his family. Anna Paquin plays her teenage daughter who comes into her own during this time and needs her mother's emotional stability, which isn't there.The first thing I ask myself is the reality behind this film. Could this really happen? Yes. Could I believe something like this could happen in Lane's character? Not with her mother-in-law living in the bungalow, as well. It's a nice film based on a time when things were a little simpler, but I don't think the director gave very much opportunity for any of the stars to "give it their all," especially co-star Viggo Mortensen. Bottom line: good plot, great actors, bad fit.7 out of 10 stars.

tedg This is a huge failure as a movie, but an interesting one in a way. At least for someone my age who lived through the period appropriated here.Here's the basic challenge in showing a love story: how do you cinematically show the pulls on the heart? The usual solution is to fold it into larger events that CAN be cinematically and richly shown. Then as one shines, the other is illuminated.Here we have two metaphors. One sorta works: hippies, sexual release from unfair constraints, idealism, rebellion. With this comes a bonus, period music that has more cinematic hooks than any other. (I hope Richie Havens does well from what he gave us.)The second metaphor is a bit forced, mapping the moonwalk as the voyage from the known to the unknown and risky. The mapping here is reinforced by having our tested family actually travel to their resort. (This resort is similar in tone to the one in "Dirty Dancing," Jewish, constrained.) We have our first forbidden sex as the moonwalk appears on the TeeVee. And the cuckolded husband is a TeeVee repairman. Whew!Things like this do work. They can work.But I think this one didn't because it had no phrasing. Phrasing is something more than rhythm and forward movement; it is the music of the thing. In the written word, you have granularities of syllable, word, phrase, thought (often a paragraph or more if dialog is involved), scenarios and then something larger which are often called acts.Film has a different set of objects at the fine granularity but the same ones starting with "scenario." Each of these levels has its own breath and the levels of granularity interact. Often what we think of as clever writing is just one level pushing the pace of another which might resist a bit. That's the secret behind "Pulp Fiction."In most cases, a movie just takes the cadences from prior entries in the genre so we don't even notice it. When those cadences are engineered deftly and uniquely, they can be supremely effective. Its why the masters are masters. Tarkovsky. Greenaway. Look at "Seven Samurai" to see how the small measures move slower than they should and the larger ones rush with less regularity, press in on the zen.The opposite is true also. When a writer, director, editor have no sense or tense of these matters, the project collapses. When you encounter one, it is worth paying attention to because these failures will tell you more about contrapuntal narrative rhythms than the successes will. In this case the writer seems to have written things down as if they were a memoir, notes, and not something with machinery designed to affect us.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

stefanchikm OK, I will admit that my initial interest in this movie stemmed from a "Viggo-is-God" mentality. He was so great in LOTR, I wanted to see him in other movies. I don't think it's fair to label Diane Lane's character as a slut. You have to be from another century to think that a person is bad because of a single moral indiscretion.It was pretty obvious to me that she was lonely and depressed because her husband ditched her in this lame Catskills resort for weeks on end, with nothing but the kids and old ladies for entertainment. Oh, and The Blouse Man (Mortensen's character). I mean, who would you pick to hang out with? The love scenes are gloriously shot, but that's all I'll say because this site has a strict spoiler rule. All fans of Mortensen and Lane (and romance) will enjoy this film.