Moonlight Mile

After his fiancée is killed, Joe goes on living in her parents' house. The three of them appear to be carrying the same grief. But Joe is hiding something: they had ended the engagement before she died and nobody knows. Now he has to play the dead girl's fiancé. The subject is not grief but the role of grief. The parents hold on to Joe and he cannot let go of them; everyone believes they are doing the others a kindness and all of them are locked in place. The form is quiet and talk-heavy; it is set in the early seventies and the period design is kept unshowy. The production comes from a personal source. Brad Silberling's girlfriend was murdered in the eighties, and he wrote this screenplay out of the relationship he formed afterwards with her family, so the strange triangle on screen comes directly from lived experience. Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon play the parents, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Joe and Ellen Pompeo the woman he meets in town. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet American drama and stories built on mourning. Who it is not for: anyone wanting resolution; the film does not carry its courtroom strand to the end and leaves threads open.