Diane Lane scored a major career success with A Walk on the Moon. She’s hardly convincing as a woman named Pearl Kantrowitz, but it’s not her fault she’s a shiksa. As a 31 year old MILF who’s never been with a man other than her husband, she’s perfect. La Lane would go on to great acclaim in a series of adulteress roles, most iconically in Unfaithful. A Walk on the Moon set the stage.

Liev Schreiber plays her devoted husband, with Viggo Mortensen as the laconic stud who seduces her.

Schreiber delivers a bravura performance as a goofy dad and blinded-by-love husband. Ultimately he essays the stages of grief in rapid order, a well written scene but an even better played one.

Their older kid is played by a 17 year old Anna Paquin, as a 15 year old who becomes a woman during the course of the summer the movie profiles. Their little boy is played by child star Bobby Boriello.

Tovah Feldshuh delivers a typically terrific performance as Schreiber’s mom, an old-fashioned woman with a good head on her shoulders.

Viggo Mortensen deserves special mention as the BlouseMan, a laid-back, bus-driving personification of counter-culture seductiveness. Mortensen would shortly go on to major movie stardom as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings.

Notables From The Large Cast

• Julie Kavner as the P.A. Announcer at the summer camp retreat known as Dr. Folger’s Bungalows
• Joseph Perrino as Anna Paquin’s summer camp boyfriend
• James Hayes Liboiron as his buddy
• Mal Z. Lawrence as a Borscht Belt Comedian, who also does a little singing – a real entertainer.

Tony Goldwyn directed only one more feature film after making his debut with A Walk on the Moon, and then became a TV director, while also continuing a very active acting career. Pamela Gray wrote only two more feature films after making her debut with A Walk on the Moon. Curious, as it’s a great film and was an independent hit when released. So what if it didn’t make money.

Amongst its pleasures

• The “Lobby at Grossingers” comic, performing with a band whose sax player has taped glasses.
• The MILF seduction performed to “one small step”, with Neal Armstrong descending from the Eagle onto the Moon.
• The pleasant evocation of a certain cultural American-Jewishness
• ERRATA: Blouseman Productions made the movie. Cute

More sexy than anything, but it sure is that. Viggo Mortensen seducing Diane Lane steams up more than his bus.

Though circumstantially playful, A Walk on the Moon essays a culturally homogenous time and place in America, just as such cultural cohesiveness began to fray. For most Americans, it’s long since fractured.