Serious Moonlight - 2009

Serious Disaster

The aptly titled "Serious Moonlight" walks a dangerous line between dark comedy and psycho-drama, but it's a tribute to writer Adrienne Shelley and first-time director Cheryl Hines that, despite the film's flaws, it ultimately pulls off its unlikely tone. It's difficult to say whether the script itself is a serious misfire or if the problem is Cheryl Hines, an actress making her directorial debut. As a director, Shelly had a particular gift for finding precisely the right tone, for floating between the real and the fantastic, the sober and the comedic, but "Serious Moonlight" is a tonal disaster, distasteful and sentimental by turns. It was probably a mistake to have Hines try to walk that same delicate line that took Shelly her entire career to master.

The film is pretty much a chamber piece in which a wife (Meg Ryan) - a hard-charging professional - finds out that her seemingly passive husband (Timothy Hutton) is about to leave her for another woman. The initial mistake is that Ryan, who is normally about as likable as any actress out there, plays the wife as a repellent nut job, so that audience sympathy is entirely with the husband even before she knocks him out with a flower pot and duct-tapes him to a chair. And there we have "Serious Moonlight." A wife duct-tapes her husband to a chair and tells him that she will make him fall in love with her again. The situation is frustrating. Audiences may begin to feel as if they're duct-taped to a chair. It might take duct tape to make people sit through this thing.

Had Shelly lived, she would have been able to control the tone. She could have tightened up sections that didn't work. She could have realized that key plot elements can be seen from a mile off and made adjustments. Or she could have written another screenplay and filmed that instead. But those are fantasy scenarios of a better world. One huge problem: There are no laughs. The dialogue is shrill and confrontational, with no real punchlines, and the pacing is beyond slack. Ryan and Hutton work at turning it into something more, but that's just not happening.

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Serious Moonlight

• A love/hate comedy.