Review: Serious Moonlight

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Serious Moonlight

Veteran actress Cheryl Hines (Curb Your Enthusiasm) directs her first film, Serious Moonlight, a dark comedy that premiered as the opening-night film at this year's Austin Film Festival. This film depicts a couple who would seem to have a perfect marriage of 13 years, but turns out that the husband thinks otherwise. Louise (Meg Ryan), a high-powered Manhattan lawyer, is touched when she arrives for the weekend to her family’s upstate getaway to find it strewn with rose petals by her husband of 13 years, Ian...

Louise (Meg Ryan) is a high-powered Manhattan lawyer who finally manages to get away early for the weekend to their upstate home, where she finds her husband Ian (Timothy Hutton), who has also arrived early. Only Ian is expecting his young girlfriend Sara (Kristen Bell) and is planning on breaking the news to his wife that he's leaving her. Louise appears to take the news well -- until she duct tapes Ian to a chair, with the intent of not releasing him until he commits to working out their marital issues. Mistress Sara arrives looking for Ian, as the lovestruck couple are about to fly to Paris for a romantic getaway. The situation gets even more complicated with the arrival of a gardener turned home invader, played by Justin Long (Dodgeball, Zack and Miri Make a Porno).

The screenplay for Serious Moonlight was written by the late Adrienne Shelly. In memory of Shelly, Hines kept every word Shelly had written, which seems to have hindered the success of Serious Moonlight in keeping the audience interested. Instead, the film suffers from the lengthy monologues and slow pacing -- the treatment as it has been preserved seems better suited for the stage. It's anyone's guess at to whether Shelly would have re-worked the script. The casting choices for the lead characters seem as poorly matched as Louise and Ian.

Why Louise would want to stay with Ian after the malicious remarks is not apparent, and it's hard to understand why she's so intent on her almost masochistic attachment to him. One has to wonder why such a high-powered attorney would be so clingy to a husband who's obviously no longer emotionally committed to their relationship.

Timothy Hutton and Meg Ryan's portrayals of an estranged couple brought together by a home invasion or neither convincing nor engaging. I'm not quite sure which performance I loathed more, but after seeing Serious Moonlight I definitely dreaded Hutton's presence in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Luckily, his screen time was shorter in Krasinski's film, and his characterization was much improved. Kristen Bell's performance was decent but not outstanding, with Justin Long being the most entertaining of the cast.

If you do decide to see Serious Moonlight --- perhaps for the war of the wills between the main characters -- I would seriously not recommend this film for date night.