Shoot the Moon (1982)
Directed by Alan Parker
Written by Bo Goldman
Starring Albert Finney, Diane Keaton, Karen Allen, Peter Weller, and Dana Hill
by Peter Rainer
Shoot the Moon, starring Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, has so many emotional crosscurrents that the screen almost trembles. The movie mainlines pure feeling from its very first shot. It’s about a hellish marriage and, at least on the surface, the plot is not that unfamiliar — we’ve seen this domestic discord before in scores of soap operas and “problem” plays. But Alan Parker, the director, and Bo Goldman, the screenwriter, take such a fresh view of a marital breakup that it’s almost like watching this material on screen for the first time.
George Dunlap (Finney) is a successful writer who, when the movie begins, can no longer abide his marriage. His face is sodden with blocked emotion; he’s at the end of his rope, and the rope soon snaps — he leaves his family and moves in with his young girlfriend (Karen Allen). In the beginning his wife, Faith (Keaton), has the blowsy, beaten look of a woman who’s trying to hold her life together and salvage her emotions while still taking care of four rambunctious daughters, ranging in age from perhaps 5 to 13. Sherry (Dana Hill), the oldest daughter, understands intuitively what’s going on with her parents; she’s hypersensitive to their torments, which she internalizes until her pain is as great as theirs. Sherry is trying to comprehend her parents as though they were adults who are responsible for their actions. What she is too young to realize is how pain can contort the behavior of adults into something childlike and irrational. George and Faith are no more in control of their feelings than their children, and yet their children look to them for comfort. That’s the tragedy at the heart of the movie.
It’s a tragedy in the most pastoral of settings. The Marin County countryside where the Dunlaps reside, in their spacious, old house, is startlingly verdant. The landscape is so beautiful that the unhappiness of its inhabitants is made to seem even more shocking than it would be in, say, an urban setting. If these people can’t get sustenance from such beauty, then what can they get sustenance from? Throughout the film, Alan Parker isolates Faith and, particularly, George, in compositions set against the coastline and the hills. Whenever there’s a downpour, the landscape seems to be weeping.
Unlike most marital breakup movies, Shoot the Moon doesn’t ennoble suffering. Misery hasn’t made George soulful—he looks wracked. Even when he’s with his girlfriend, his brow is a tight band of tension. Faith has more moods, more expressions. In an early scene, when she drives in silent misery with George to a book-awards dinner, her face looks as hard as a harridan’s. (From certain angles, Diane Keaton resembles Garbo in one of those fugitive shots of her outside her New York apartment.) At other times, her face in the moonlight seems frosted. When, after George has left her, Faith invites to dinner the contractor who’s building a tennis court on her property, she has the luminescence of a debutante. But Faith is hopeful without having much hope: she has a chummy, tentative affair with that contractor (Peter Weller), but she doesn’t really put much store in it. She knows it isn’t meant to last.
George is far less practical than Faith. Even though he is the one who breaks off the marriage, he can’t quite accept what that means. Without being fully aware of it, he wants back in. He keeps returning to the scene of the crime, not just to see his children but to tempt Faith. When he realizes that she has not crumpled without him—that she has, in fact, taken a lover—he’s both proud of her and maddened by her independence.
George doesn’t take a very romantic view of his own suffering; it turns him into a violent rampager who, at one point, breaks into his house and crashes into his eldest daughter’s bedroom in an attempt to see her against her wishes. But George does harbor certain romantic-masochistic fancies about being a writer. He feels a kinship with Jack London, whose burned-down home, now a historical landmark, he visits with his girlfriend and three of his daughters. George has led a privileged life, and he knows it. His wife has devoted her life to their children, leaving him pretty much free to ruminate. As the movie develops, we become aware of how guilty George feels for that privilege. That’s really why he leaves: he can’t handle either the guilt or the awe he feels for what Faith has done.
I hope all this doesn’t imply that Shoot the Moon is some sort of feminist tract. It’s far too complex and unsentimental for that. Alan Parker and Bo Goldman are scrupulously fair-minded—they give all the characters their due. The Marin County of this movie is the same stomping ground that Cyra McFadden ploughed in Serial, but, seen through artists’ eyes this time, it’s barely recognizable as such. Karen Allen as smiley Sandy, George’s girlfriend, whose speech is awash in pop-therapy cant (she tells George, “You’re my friend”), is viewed by the filmmakers with the same even-handedness as George and Faith. And the Dunlap children are perhaps the most unsentimentalized, and therefore the most realistic, children ever seen in a movie. (Besides the extraordinary Dana Hill, there’s Viveka Davis, Tracey Gold and Tina Yothers.) Except for Sherry, George’s daughters are equal-opportunity ragamuffins—they give each of their parents countless chances to prove their love. They’re surprisingly resilient—almost comically so. Their high-spiritedness has a slapstick energy that turns even the most brutal assaults, such as George’s household rampage, into black comedy. (After the smoke clears, the youngest daughter, the red-headed Molly, asks her father if she can make him a hamburger with onions.)
Diane Keaton has often been a graceful, offhandedly funny performer but, except for moments in Interiors and Reds, she’s never demonstrated as much depth as she does here. Every gesture is in character; every look has overtones. We can see in Faith not only the woman she has become but the girl she was when she married George—a little star-struck, perhaps, and eager for nurturing. Albert Finney’s performance is not quite as translucent as Keaton’s—we can’t see as many emotional possibilities in it—but he’s more than up to the role’s demands. I think it’s his finest performance on film. And on a smaller scale, Peter Weller’s Frank matches him as the tennis-court contractor.
It’s possible, I think, to view Shoot the Moon as a screwball comedy turned inside out. When George and Faith accidentally meet at a swank restaurant and create a scene, the episode is played for broad laughs. Alan Parker’s staging here is maladroit, but the sequence works anyway; it carries us back to the pleasures of ’30s screwball comedies even as the movie goes beyond those pleasures. Howard Hawks once said that he would only direct a tragedy if he saw no way to make it a comedy. Alan Parker and Bo Goldman have it both ways in Shoot the Moon. It’s a sorrowful film, but it expresses the human comedy. Watching it, you’re amazed at what love and lovelessness can do to people, how it can warp them into monsters and rag dolls and buffoons. This movie is saying the same things the screwball comedies were saying, only in a different key: It’s saying that, on some essential level, human beings are bewilderingly inadequate to the demands of love. They can’t handle it.
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, January 22, 1982
