Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511130025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL WILMINGTON CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The widow is emotionally fragile but functional, her pals a trio of cutups. Together, they learn to face life joyously again - which, if not exactly a new phenomenon in movies or plays, at least carries a charge for these characters.
It's a funny-sad movie, set in the kind of intellectual-caste New York milieu where people make jokes about Sylvia Plath and ``Jules and Jim.'' And the movie buries its poignant subject beneath a surface full of snappy repartee, something you might expect from a script written by a member of the Simon family - Neil's daughter Ellen wrote both the original play and the film script.
In the movie, a buttoned-up college English teacher named Rebecca Trager Lott (played by Elizabeth Perkins) loses her husband when he's struck by a car while jogging. In quick order, we meet her support group: an eccentric and whimsical crew that includes pal Sylvie Morrow (Whoopi Goldberg), sister Lucy Trager (Gwyneth Paltrow) and ex-stepmother Alberta Russell (Kathleen Turner).
As they trade witticisms and commiserate, enact Native American rituals, matchmake for each other or ogle a sexy house painter, we may wonder why writer Simon doesn't indulge Rebecca's loss more, why her sorrow has to be smothered in levity.
Instead, the film takes its title from that house painter who's turning them all on - played by rocker Jon Bon Jovi with shaggy tresses and a killer smile. In his film-acting debut, accompanied by a dog named Valentino and oozing seductive elan, Bon Jovi seems the ideal fantasy figure to help ease a bereavement.
Every director should be lucky enough to get a cast that includes Perkins, Turner, Paltrow - and especially Goldberg, whose dead-on comic timing makes you forget mortality awhile. But should ``Moonlight's'' funny moments so heavily outweigh its sad? Is anything more annihilating than the premature or sudden loss of the person to whom one is closest?
The tone here is so flip, woozy and light-hearted that, in a way, the reality of the loss never fully reaches us. We're outside grief's grip almost from the start - even though Simon based the play on episodes after the death of her own young husband.
Perhaps, in the end, ``Moonlight and Valentino'' sabotages much of its drama and comedy by being instantly smiley, insisting too much on the dark cloud's silvery living.
\ Moonlight and Valentino **
A Grammercy Pictures release playing at The Grandin Theatre. 105 min. Rated R for language, nudity.
by CNB