Serious Moonlight (DVD)

Meg Ryan’s career has slowly been going downhill over the last decade, and sadly Serious Moonlight is going to do nothing to stop the decline. She plays Louise, a high-powered lawyer who goes to her weekend home a day early to find that her husband, Ian (Timothy Hutton), is in the middle of writing a ‘Dear John’ letter, before heading off to Paris with his new women (Kristen Bell).

Unimpressed by this, Louise throws a flowerpot at her hubby, knocks him out and then duct-tapes him to a chair. Her plan is to find a way to make him love her again, although when he wakes up and finds himself unable to move, love isn’t exactly the first thing on his mind. Cue a few screwball set-ups and a lot of shouting, and then Ian gets knocked out again, this time waking up strapped to a toilet. In a case of what seems like extremely bad timing, a burglar (Justin Long) shows up, finds Ian unable to move and proceeds to rob the joint, with things eventually ending up with Ian, Louise and his mistress all taped up in the bathroom.

You might have already spotted the problem here, which is that while the latter half of the film sounds like it could be decent screwball fun, the beginning merely sounds unpleasant. Our introduction to the main characters is with one of them planning to run off with another women and the other almost psychotically taping someone to a chair. As a result, right from the get-go it’s difficult to like these people, and while the movie has a go at explaining how things got so bad, it never overcomes the basic spitefulness of the set-up.

The movie was written by Adrienne Shelley, and she was originally going to direct as well before she was tragically murdered in 2006. As a result, the directing reins were passed to Cheryl Hines, best known as Larry David’s other half in Curb Your Enthusiasm. She appeared in Shelley’s film Waitress, and makes her directing debut here. However, one of the provisos for getting the job was that Hines wasn’t allowed to change a word of the script, which was a mistake. While Shelley had spent years mastering a subtle, bitter comedy, and may have been able to turn Serious Moonlight into something more subversive and entertaining, here it merely comes across as unpleasant and often verges on outright nastiness.

With Ian first duct-taped to a chair and then a toilet, it also makes it a very talky film that by necessity is pretty static. While that might have been okay, it all comes across as rather stagey. In fact I wondered whether Shelley had originally written Serious Moonlight for the theatre, but apparently not. There are moments where the film breaks through the character’s inherent un-likability, and it reveals some true heart and a few interesting insights – mainly surrounding how the main couple started out as nice people and why things have gone so wrong – however the screwball set-up does little to sustain this. Your main reaction is likely to be that these are two horrible people who shouldn’t be married in the first place, and who you don’t really want to spend much time with.

As I say, Shelley may have been able to do something interesting with it, but by treating the script as sacrosanct, Cheryl Hines was slightly hamstrung. There’s the bones of something interesting here – a man who’s lost his way and a woman desperately clinging onto something that seems to have been lost long ago – but the meat of the film is more unpleasant than entertaining.

It’s little surprise really that Serious Moonlight is being shoved out in the UK straight-to-DVD, with no special features. Indeed, the distributor is initially releasing it exclusively at Tesco and Tesco Online, which doesn't suggest they're expecting a massive hit.

Overall Verdict: It’s tough to make a comedy work which is about unpleasant people being horrible to one another, and Serious Moonlight isn't going to prove otherwise.

Special Features:
Trailer

Reviewer: Tim Isaac