Given its very limited scope and isolated setup, Serious Moonlight often feels like you're watching a four-person play which takes place over 24 hours, with simplistic and expository dialogue throughout.
A Brief Overview of Serious Moonlight
Ian (Timothy Hutton, The Ghost Writer) and Louise (Meg Ryan, The Women) have been married for 13 years, and live on a remote farm in the California hills. She is a bossy and demanding attorney. He is an unhappily married businessman.
When Ian plans to leave Louise and their marriage in order to fly off to Paris to propose to his mistress Sara (Kristen Bell, When in Rome), the high maintenance attorney flips out and knocks out Ian with a potted plant and ties him up to a chair with duct tape. Unwilling to be one of those 40-something divorced women who couldn't make their marriage work, Louise defiantly tells her cheating hubby that by the time she's done with him, he will love her again, and will forget about the young woman (Sara) he thinks he should be with.
After a near-escape attempt and another broken pot to the noggin, Ian now finds himself taped to the toilet seat (in case he needs, to, ya know, go), with Louise forcing him to watch old wedding pictures of the both of them, serving him his favorite foods, and playing the milestone songs from their relationship.
Just as Louise returns from the village with groceries to prepare a reconciliatory dinner, she walks in on a trio of thieves led by a cynical criminal named Todd (Justin Long, Funny People) busily robbing their house, with Ian still hogtied to the porcelain upstairs.
As the bumbling thieving trio tie up Louise next to Ian -- and later Sara as she shows up to look for her beau --- the three must find a way out of this predicament, that is, if they don't kill each other first.
Wbat Makes Serious Moonlight Work as a Dark Comedy
There's a certain advantage to be gained by having this film center around only four characters in a remote country house over the span of two days. If anything, it allows for much character development, rather than far fetched subplots taking the audience all over the place.
This deliberate isolation from the world allows for maximum effect when it comes to the characters' relationships to each other, and provides Ryan with the best opportunity for comedy since her big break in the classic When Harry Met Sally. Granted, Louise is no Sally Albright, but the reaches of her character's neuroses know no bounds in this hilarious yet modest comedy.
Timothy Hutton gets to play for laughs for once, having worked a career mostly filled with dramatic roles (TAPS and Turk 182 come to mind.) The growing anger Ian builds towards his wife-turned-kidnapper is a comedic goldmine, one he taps into on-and-off during the film.
As for Bell and Long, they are both sadly relegated to very supportive -- make that unsupportive roles, being given very little to work with other than to offer some conflict into the bickering couple's lives. This is clearly Hutton and Ryan's show, and they're just tagging along.
Serious Moonlight a Tribute to a Brilliant Screenwriter
This project was the unproduced brainchild of the late actress/writer Adrienne Shelly, who'd appeared in several films in the past decade, namely Waitress (which she had also directed), Sleep with Me, Trust and The Unbelievable Truth. Shelly was murdered in her New York City apartment in November 2006, leaving her spouse Andrew Ostroy with a legacy of unproduced scripts, one of which became Moonlight.
Ostroy serves as producer for this film, which was helmed by first time director Cheryl Hines, herself an actress who'd also appeared in Waitress and who's best known as Larry David's wife in TV's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Since Hines and the late screenwriter had been good friends, it only made sense for the former to ensure the latter's work got to see the light of day.
The Final Word on Serious Moonlight
This isn't exactly a product that's at par with scripts by Nora Ephron, yet one gets the feeling that Shelly really knew how to tap into the relationships and backgrounds of her onscreen characters. The film does have a neat twist ending (no spoilers here, kids!), and makes for a fun night of viewing, for anyone who's into dark comedies. Enjoy
Serious Moonlight: 3 out of 5
Dominic Messier - Dominic Messier is a Toronto-based Film & TV writer, Sci-Fi TV and Film Dramas Topic Editor, and creator of PopCultureLandscape.com
