I'd like to give this movie a 7, instead of a 6, but I was severely distracted by one question: Why is everyone Jewish? If I found myself watching a movie of a summer camp full of people who were all, say, Catholics, I would be compelled to wonder what the reason the screenwriter had in mind: This question is never answered in A Walk On The Moon. Otherwise, this is a very pedestrian, very typically "Hollywood out-of-touch" treatment of what could have been vital, transforming scenes and dynamic dialogue.I suppose my main complaint with A Walk On The Moon is that we never get to fully meet the characters, so that when they experience inter-personal conflict and pain, it is hard to gather empathy. Neither the characters, nor the relationships there-of, are adequately illustrated. Also, Julie Kavner's voice is bad enough when she talks face-to-face. Over a megaphone, it is pure hell.

The posters for "A Walk on the Moon" show Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, two attractively talented people working in the movies today, lying in a grassy field, arms around each other, hinting at a deep romance and longing for each other. That is something we get next to nothing of in the movie. But false advertising and misleading setups are a common thing in Hollywood and the media today, and always have been. The largest problem of this picture is the level of its tedious schmaltz. It is trying to paint a story that talks about marital (and extra-marital) relationships and how they can affect the lives of others, but it nevertheless comes across as absolutely insincere. That is whenever it's not just simply boring.Lane is an unhappy mother of two. Unhappy because she essentially threw away her young adult life becoming pregnant at age seventeen, only three years older than her eldest daughter, and unhappy because her husband is seldom around to spend time with them. His excuse is that he has to work to pay for all of them, for their becoming pregnant early on ruined his chances at a better education and profession. So even when they visit a summer camp for families, he continually has to return home to fix TVs; there is a high demand for them because Neil Armstrong will soon walk on the moon. Lane is going through the motions of her up-down life, when she starts an affair with a local blouse salesman (Mortensen) and, as you would expect, things start to come crashing down.The movie has good intentions; to deny that would be foolish. For the picture tries to touch on how extra-martial relationships can cripple family dynamics. For instance, Lane's daughter (well-played by Anna Paquin) learns of her mother's affairs at the same time she is becoming intimately involved with one of the local boys. It's a little refreshing to see the teenage girl, not boy, be the lascivious one for a change. It's also nice to see the unmarried individual in the affair (the blouse man) not become a sexual predator, stalking and hunting down Lane and her family. We've seen "Fatal Attraction." What kills the picture is the screenplay by Pamela Gray. Her background lies in the realm of television, and unfortunately it does show. For "A Walk on the Moon" does not make any motions toward an emotional or dynamic climax; it just drones on and on like a really long pilot episode to a television series best not picked up by a network. Scenes that are meant to deliver an impact cut off before they can register any emotion. So a scene where Lane and Mortensen visit the 1969 Woodstock event, and go nuts, comes across as just disturbingly out-of-place, not disturbing in the context of what they are doing. And although Lane and Paquin pour their hearts and souls into their performances, a key moment where they have a mother-daughter discussion about sex seems forced, not passionate. Again, like a television movie.The same can be said of the directing by Tony Goldwyn, but only to an extent. Goldwyn has a good sense of montage. He's a good director. But before he can become a great director, he needs to learn to do two things: have the confidence to order a rewrite, and pull back on his camera lenses. Almost every shot in the picture is nauseating claustrophobic, like it was meant for a screen shaped like a square instead of a rectangle. The only time he uses his wide-angle lenses effectively is in a not-romantic scene where Lane and Mortensen go swimming in the nude (what else do movie-couples do these days?) and they jump off a cliff to get into the water. Lane and Mortensen have no special chemistry together; it also seems forced and insincere. And talented and good-looking as both of them are, they do fail to steam up the screen because the screenplay is so limp and the characters so dull. They have two sex scenes together, the second one more ludicrous than the first, and just as lacking in eroticism.The best performance in the movie is by the underrated Liev Schreiber, as Lane's husband. But he is given nothing to do but stand around and look morose. And as I was watching him act in this picture, I wasn't thinking about his character or what he must have been thinking during the inevitable discovery-of-betrayal scene (I don't think anybody walking in will not see this from a mile away) but instead of what a great actor like him was doing in a picture this limp. The rest of the cast is very good as well. Paquin, in particular, is also very good. But the story surrounding them, and the material they are given to work with, is so dull and contrived that it really boggles me how this picture managed to get placed on a big screen. It looks like something HBO would put on during a random weekend.

I was 20 in 1969. I wasn't at Woodstock. I was on a Road Trip from New York to Denver and then SF - finding myself - selfishly, just like the people in this movie. The movie encapsulated many experiences in that one summer. Looking back, it took me several years to experience what was covered in this movie. For me, that occurred between 1967 and 1972 -- between Sgt Pepper and Jackson Browne -- between Chicago and Berkeley -- from college, through marriage and divorce, to California freedom. I remember being the guy whose wife needed and found someone else. I remember being the young free spirit dating the divorcée -- or the almost divorcée. Yes, these could have happened to anyone else at any other time. And generational conflicts that marked 1969 - rebellion, loose morals, iconoclasm, etc - did occur at other times in history. But this movie accurately portrayed what I did experience: listening to those songs, attending those kinds of concerts, dating those kinds of girls, just being young, free and ... yes ... selfish. I learned a lot from those experiences. And this movie did an excellent job presenting many of those conflicts, moral choices and learning experiences.

"A Walk on the Moon" has a teen in it, but it's definitely a grown-up movie. It helps to remember 1969 though one does wince at some of the inaccuracies as too much cultural symbolism is thrown into that summer. Hey, where's the rain at Woodstock? - it was only nice weather on the Friday. Some of the music was inaccurate - what were the odds of turning on the radio in 1969 and hearing "Sally Go Round the Roses" from 1962? Why would someone from NYC claim they couldn't afford college and not consider what's now CUNY?This is Liev Schreiber's first grown-up movie I think; he was quite good in Shakespeare in the Park last summer. Some reviewers bashed the movie because Schreiber is so good (especially as he discovers the power of Dylan and Jimi Hendrix) that one sympathizes with both the adulterer and the cuckold - gee but ain't life complicated, as what comes across is the importance of family. Too bad the Blouse Man (very appealing Viggo Mortensen) is just basically a hippie and he's not a real person, but everyone else is. Anna Paquin as a teen discovering that her parents are people too was wonderful. Diane Lane's NY accent does waver quite a bit.I lost my objectivity whenever Tovah Feldshuh spoke. As the grandmother she sounded so much like my grandma, who of course was alive in 1969, that I practically cried every time she was on the screen, though mine had a thicker Yiddish accent. All in all, a very touching movie.(Originally written 4/11/1999)