Review: SERIOUS MOONLIGHT

Timothy Hutton spends most of SERIOUS MOONLIGHT, an irritating new comedy from director Cheryl Hines, duct-taped to a toilet. SERIOUS MOONLIGHT is 84 excruciating minutes of sub-sitcom dialogue, grating characters and a whole lot of shouting and I felt as though I was duct-taped to my theatre seat forced to watch the most labored, obnoxious movie I’ve sat through all year. SERIOUS MOONLIGHT is not interestingly odious, excitingly embarrassing, or cultishly screwed-up. It’s just dull, claustrophobic, and worst of all – never for a moment funny. Seriously.

SERIOUS MOONLIGHT begins when high-powered attorney Louise (Meg Ryan) arrives home early to surprise husband of 13 years Ian (Hutton) and finds flower petals strewn about the house. The romantic gesture is not for her but in anticipation of a visit by Ian’s much younger mistress, Sara (Kristen Bell), whom he expects to whisk off to Paris the next day and propose marriage. Louise takes action by duct-taping Ian and holding him prisoner in the house, hoping he’ll come to his senses and reconsider. A drunken lawn boy (Justin Long) who finds Ian, ransacks the house, binding Louise with him in the bathroom. Sarah is also bound there when she returns to the house. The three proceed to spend the rest of the film battling out their differences in a door-slamming bedroom farce that presumably intends to recall the classic screwball comedy. It doesn’t and SERIOUS MOONLIGHT is a serious failure.

Comedy is subjective and everyone has a different opinion of exactly what constitutes good humor but SERIOUS MOONLIGHT is instantly tedious and the audience I saw it with was completely silent (except the ones who made noise leaving their seats and exiting the theatre early). The theme of middle-aged marital infidelity is old hat and there’s nothing new in SERIOUS MOONLIGHT. The characters never engage as Louise and Ian both seem so self-absorbed and unpleasant that it’s hard to care whether they stay together or not. It takes a deft hand to make an audience care about the piffling problems of people this attractive, rich and smug. Woody Allen perhaps, but first-time director Cheryl Hines (best known for playing Larry David’s wife in “Curb Your Enthusiasm�) can’t pull it off, lurching from episode to episode without any comic rhythm and the result is a shocking dearth of entertainment value.

It’s bewildering how such a collection of talents could contribute to such a catastrophically bad film as SERIOUS MOONLIGHT. Timothy Hutton, miscast, is his usually mopey drip and there is something grotesque about the way the charmless Ian is so adored by the very young, beautiful Sara. Kristen Bell looks like she just wants to fire her agent and Justin Long is supposed to be the type of benevolent rascal found in harmless comedies yet he beats the defenseless Ian with his fists, then knocks out Louise and threatens to molest her. Faring the worst is Meg Ryan who mugs, rolls her eyes, and yells like she’s auditioning for an updating of ‘Laverne and Shirley’ and her shrill character’s histrionics and criminal actions make no sense. We’re supposed to believe a beautiful, successful, and sane woman would tie up her husband and tell him he can’t leave until he loves her again?

Is this film, written and directed by women, supposed to exemplify contemporary feminism? Ryan, a one-time ‘A-List’ star, has been desperately looking for a comeback film the past few years, but SERIOUS MOONLIGHT won’t be it (though she looks exactly the same as she did when she was starring in hits like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY twenty years ago except that her lips are now disturbingly more plump). The script is by Adrienne Shelly, who wrote and directed 2007’s well-received WAITRESS before an illegal immigrant strangled her to death in November of 2006 after she caught him trying to rob her apartment. Hines claims she wanted to preserve Shelly’s project exactly as she intended it, but her stagebound script seems unfinished and plays like a work in progress. Justin Long’s villain for example, is at one point joined by two (or was it three?) cohorts but these characters add nothing to the story and are never even introduced, they’re just there. I suspect had Ms Shelly lived, she would have wanted to polish this screenplay before it went before the cameras. I’m not a cynical moviegoer and I always try to find something positive, but SERIOUS MOONLIGHT is a serious disaster.