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Serious Moonlight

Meg Ryan, Timothy Hutton, Justin Long, Kristen Bell

Some people age gracefully and others get duck lips. Meg Ryan got duck lips. Do not stare at the duck lips. Do not stare at the duck lips. For the love of God do not stare at the duck lips... Oh, God, I did. With films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, and You've Got Mail, Meg was America's cute, perky sweetheart. She looked more like the girl next door than a Marilyn Monroe movie star. Yet, youth and beauty are fleeting, like trying to hold water in cupped hands. One day you are the young woman to bring home to mother, and the next you are mother. Unlike Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, or Harrison Ford, who can be both leading men and AARP poster boys, for the most part, women have the cinematic shelf life of ripe bananas. She has to be an object of desire, a piece of eye candy. With eighteen year old ingenues without a sag, wrinkle or extra ounce of fat getting off the bus every day, it is easy to understand why a woman, whose whole being and sense of self-worth rests on her looks, would take advantage of whatever she can to fight off the ravages of time, whether that fountain of youth can be found in exercise, a needle or a surgeon's scalpel. Poor Meg, has become that cougar sitting at the end of the bar and she screwed up her face in the process. With her lip implants, face lifts and botox injections, with all apologizes to Heath Ledger, she has transformed herself into the maternal Joker.

It has been almost a decade since Meg Ryan was a relevant movie star. Her face is a billboard of her desperation, a desperation that caused her to show her mommy parts (In The Cut), slut it up (Against The Ropes), and crawled on her knees to her three time on-screen partner, Hanks, with an idea for a fourth pairing. I doubt anyone reading this column could even name one of her last four motion pictures. There are kids on the back of milk cartons who are more in the public eye than she is anymore. It is a hell of a fall of a woman who not too long ago was the highest paid actress in Hollywood.

So, maybe it is right that she plays a seriously desperate woman in her best film in years. What is sad is this movie is going to be marketed as several things, but a Meg Ryan romantic comedy is not one of them. It is one of two unproduced screenplays from the fertile mind of the late Adrienne Shelly, whose genius Hollywood seemed only to discover after her tragic murder and the release of Waitress starring Keri Russell, which she co-starred, wrote, and directed. The efforts of her husband, Andrew Ostroy, to not only raise their young child but set up a foundation in honor of her, and bring her murderer to justice (She was killed by an illegal immigrant who was stealing money from her purse and then tried to make it look like she committed suicide.) and get her two remaining projects made is truly inspirational.and moving. Cheryl Hines, her friend and Waitress co-star is on -board in the director's chair. If that name sounds familiar, she is better known as Mrs. Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Kristen Bell, who is famous as "Veronica Mars" and Sarah Marshall of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Justin Long (Dodgeball and Ed") are probably bigger stars now. The actor who steals the movie is a former leading man who is in a similar position as Ryan, Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People, Taps, Beautiful Girls), who is duct taped to a chair and later a toilet throughout most of the film.

Hutton, who actually shared the silver screen with Ryan before in French Kiss, plays Ian, a businessman, who is at his country house preparing to leave his bitchy wife for his twenty-something-year-old receptionist, Sara (Bell). Ian has strewn the house with rose pedals to celebrate one last night before the couple escapes to Paris. When Louise (Ryan), a high powered attorney with a cell phone that seems permanently attached to her ear, discovers what her husband is up to, she is bound and determined to talk him out of it and get him to love her again, even if that means kidnapping him, and literally duct taping him into place so he will listen. This is a low rent War of the Roses confined to a couple of rooms, a battle of the sexes and for the heart. Things spin even further out of control when Todd (Long), the gardener, decides to take advantage of the situation, do a little stealing, and do some partying while the couple are occupied. If Todd is not enough, Sara shows up to discover things are not what she was expecting. Pretty soon, the two women find themselves in a similar position as Ian. Will they escape? Will Ian and Louise work out their differences, or will Ian run off with Sara?

Everyone is well cast, particularly Hutton and Ryan, and the movie is better than 75 percent of cinematic fare that audiences sit through. While I can tell that Shelly was not done rewriting her screen play and there are a few issues here and there, this movie shows what a great talent audiences lost when she was killed.

Verdict: An Okay Film