A Walk on the Moon

Summer 1969. Pearl Kantrowitz is at a bungalow colony in the Catskills with her husband and two children. She got pregnant at seventeen and married, and has not chosen a single thing since. A travelling blouse salesman comes to the colony. In the same weeks men land on the moon and Woodstock is being built a few miles away. Pearl misses neither. The film is less interested in adultery than in a youth arriving too late. It does not judge Pearl, but it does not soften the consequences either: her daughter sees her, and that scene is the hardest thing in the film. Tony Goldwyn's first film as director. Diane Lane plays Pearl, Viggo Mortensen the salesman, Liev Schreiber her husband, Anna Paquin the daughter and Tovah Feldshuh the grandmother. The detail of colony life is the best thing in it: the women spending the whole summer there, the husbands arriving only at weekends, and the particular society that forms inside that arrangement. Who it is for: anyone who likes the end of the sixties told through one family, and anyone who likes Diane Lane. Who it is not for: anyone tired of the period's icons. Using the moon landing and Woodstock at once overloads the symbolism, and the ending is too conciliatory.