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Serious Moonlight: stockholm syndrome in the suburbs
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A wonderfully squirmy black comedy with a heart that’s more honest than saccharine, Serious Moonlight establishes Adrienne Shelly as one of the screen’s most unusual writers. She’s a storyteller capable of making us laugh yet wonder why we’re laughing, all the while questioning love - why does it exist? why does it disappear? - with dialogue that rings true in unexpectedly lovely ways.
Meg Ryan stars as Louise, an uber-successful lawyer who arrives at a vacation house filled with flower petals her husband (Timothy Hutton) has strewn in anticipation of the much younger mistress (Kristen Bell) he’s planning on moving to Paris with. Louise, who can’t wrap her head around the notion that she might not get what she wants, knocks him out with a flower pot, duct tapes him to various pieces of furniture, and promises she’ll let him go – but not until he loves her again. Her unhinged attempts at Stockholm syndrome include slides of their marriage and baking chocolate chip cookies he refuses to eat.
Shelly’s premise could have unspooled as a watered down, one-joke attempt at, say, a Harold Pinter play - menace lurking in the subtext and desperate, neurotic characters struggling to communicate with one another. It’s the opposite of that, which is why it works so well.
In Shelly’s world, everything is right on the surface, but this never comes across as expositional or lazy. The stakes keep rising and the characters are written and performed in such a way that you root for them despite yourself. Even the supporting roles – Bell as the seemingly-sympathetic mistress, Justin Long as a robber lucky enough to stumble into a house where the patriarch is already tied up – fulfill and defy stereotypes.
Cheryl Hines, making her directorial debut, creates a tone that’s the perfect blend of cheery and queasy, and facilitates a great rapport between her leads. It’s nice to see Hutton give nuance to a character who could have been a doormat, and nicer still to see Ryan finally working with a script (read: not The Women) worthy of the disarmingly likable, refreshingly flawed women she’s so adept at playing.
Note: Serious Moonlight screens this week as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.
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