The entire film in a nutshell: Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton headline as a husband and wife at odds with one another -- nice throwback casting with the potential for engaging interplay. The story centers on a scorned woman's desperate attempt to win her husband back -- a little clichéd, but it could work. The woman does so by kidnapping said husband and duct-taping him to the toilet seat until he once again discovers the love he lost somewhere along the way -- oddly quirky, kind of forced, but it could still be handled well. Then a group of rogue lawn care workers ransack the house and hold the couple hostage, giving them time to share lugubrious sentiments and potentially reconcile -- huh? Then Hutton's mistress shows up, is also taken hostage, and the love triangle drifts from soulless slapstick to depressing turmoil to creepy psychodrama until one last fraudulent reveal leaves the audience squirming -- ick.
Louise (Ryan) has high hopes when she returns home from a business trip to find a trail of roses leading to her bedroom. Her husband, Ian (Hutton), is waiting, but not for her -- he has a young chippy waiting in the wings. Duct-taping one's philandering husband to a toilet should be the set-up for a madcap romp, but Serious Moonlight has a decidedly low energy level, as if the participants entered into the project with high hopes but were left deflated when they realized the magic ingredient was missing. The scenes also contain a nasty shot of hatred, as air-headed psychopath Louise faces off with shouting bastard Ian in a war of who can be cruelest. In an unfortunate bit of name-drop casting, Kristen Bell pops up as the bitchy mistress and Justin Long plays the aimless thief, and both actors put most of their talent in check to play one-note creations of a scenario that only uses them to kill time between emotional blow-ups.
Cheryl Hines, a wonderful character actress, jumps into the director's chair in what is obviously an effort to pay homage to her dear friend, but perhaps the best elegy would have been to leave well enough alone. As a filmmaker, Hines lacks any semblance of visual depth; the film is framed with square-jawed earnestness, which I assume with a fair amount of confidence was not the intent of the writer. Shelly displayed a dark, angry, screw-loose inspiration in Waitress that she would have brought to this film. Hines' interpretation of the script, however, is too sunny and slap-happy for material this twisted. It takes a special touch to make lunacy feel weighty and believable. Shelly had that.
In Waitress, Shelly demonstrated an uncanny knack for blending fairy tale dreaminess with dark anger. Her screenplay for Serious Moonlight possesses the same tonal challenge, and it's too bad the late filmmaker isn't around to sprinkle her directorial magic over the proceedings. As her proxy, Hines has the best intentions but can only treat the material with a literal gaze -- and when viewed literally, this material is shallow, flighty, insipid farce.
Sadder still, in the final analysis, the film bucks against everything Waitress celebrated. That film was about the wistful, melancholy escape from horrible circumstances, about breaking free in the face of insurmountable odds. Serious Moonlight is a hopeless, cynical movie about psychotic people who trick one another into staying together so they can have babies. It is lazy, joyless, and uncomfortable. It is the anti-Waitress, and it feels anti-Shelly, too.
The DVD includes a making-of featurette and a commentary track.
Serious adhesion.
