Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind and the Woodstock hippy-fest form an evocative backdrop for insightful drama in A Walk on the Moon. Sexy as hell, this 1999 movie features Diane Lane as a truly beautiful cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof and teenaged Anna Paquin as her too-hot-to-trot daughter, circa 1969.

Tony Goldwyn’s feature film directorial debut is a sensational piece of work, from it’s buoyant opening to its recreation of Woodstock. Beneath the nostalgic schmaltz, it sharply limns the time when do your own thing took over for do the traditional thing. For better or worse, the times they aren’t a changing back.

‘69 was a defining year and A Walk on the Moon is a defining movie of that epochal moment in time.

Acting - Really Great 4.5

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.

Film - Great 4.0

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

Edge - Risqué 2.2

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

Reality - Glib 1.2

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.

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