Rebecca Lott, a thirtysomething. college lecturer, is widowed when her husband Ben is killed by a car while jogging. The rest of the film is taken up with Rebecca endlessly talking over her emotional problems with her younger sister Lucy, her best friend Sylvie and her former stepmother Alberta. There are subplots about Lucy's romance with Stephen, one of Rebecca's students, and Rebecca's brief romance with a handsome young man hired to paint her house. The film ends with the four women performing a bizarre quasi-pagan ritual designed to help Rebecca cope with her grief. And that's it.
The film is what used to be called a "woman's picture", but with one major difference. The traditional "woman's picture" had as its primary character a strong female figure, with the male characters as secondary ones, defined in terms of their relationship to her. Here the primary character is the rather passive figure of Rebecca, with Lucy, Sylvie and Alberta as the secondary ones and the male characters, insofar as we see them at all, vague tertiary ones. The film-makers are, essentially, trying to make a film about the romantic and emotional lives of a group of heterosexual women while airbrushing men out of the picture as far as possible. Ben never appears (his death is announced right at the beginning of the film), and Rebecca and Lucy's father Thomas only appears briefly. (Their mother Joanna died from cancer fourteen years earlier). Stephen is a minor character and Sylvie's husband Paul an even more minor one, although we learn that their marriage is an unhappy one. The nearest thing to a major male character is The Painter, and it is noteworthy that we never learn his name and that he is played not by a professional actor but by a rock star with virtually no previous acting experience.
The result is that the film ends up devoid of any dramatic conflict or tension. The nearest we get is the suggestion that the two sisters, especially Lucy, resent their stepmother for usurping their mother's role in their lives. Yet we do not sense from the film itself that Alberta, who is supposed to be a hard-bitten career woman, has done anything that might provoke resentment; indeed, she treats the sisters with great kindness, doing far more to console Rebecca, who was only briefly her stepdaughter, in her bereavement than does her father. Stephen Holden of the New York Times, called the film "a genteel, buttoned-up soap opera", which strikes me as being unfair to soap operas, much as I dislike that particular genre. "Moonlight and Valentino" is around four times the length of an episode of most British soaps, and any scriptwriter for "Coronation Street" or "East Enders" would soon find themselves out of a job if they wasted four entire episodes with as little drama or action as is included in the 105 minutes of this film.
I watched this film when it was recently shown on television largely because the cast included two actresses I had admired in other films, Gwyneth Paltrow in "Sylvia" and Kathleen Turner in films like "The Accidental Tourist" and "Serial Mom". Unfortunately, it turned out to be a big disappointment to me, which was not really the fault of Paltrow, Turner and the two other leading actresses, all of whom gave the impression that they could do much more with better material. (Although if Whoopi Goldberg wants to be taken seriously as a serious actress as opposed to a comedienne, she might consider getting rid of her childish stage name. Naming herself after a whoopee cushion was not perhaps her greatest career move).
Instead the fault lies with the script, based on a play by Ellen Simon, who unfortunately does not seem to have inherited the dramatic talents of her more famous father Neil, and with David Anspaugh's direction. Roger Ebert described it as "very sincere, very heartfelt and very bad", a judgement from which I would not dissent, although I would also add very tasteful, very sensitive and incredibly boring. The whole thing is done with the sort of excruciatingly ghastly good taste that makes you long for someone to say or do something tasteless just to relieve the monotony of four people sitting round being nice to one another. 4/10
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