Books, Arts & Manners: Failed Moonshot

From that initial sequence of shots in Shoot the Moon introducing us to the imposing, isolated farmhouse of George and Faith Dunlap and their four young daughters, we can tell we are in for pretension and fakery. It is a moist evening in Marin County, and as the camera, en route to the house, picks out darkling, abandoned objects, it lingers over an upturned child’s bicycle with one wheel still revolving. The music on the soundtrack (to be periodically repeated) is one insecure finger picking out on the piano “Don’t Blame Me.” The entire family is ensconced in the house; why is that spurned, forlorn wheel still spinning? What child’s, or merely childlike, finger is tentatively, touchingly disclaiming guilt? We never find out; it is all simply unearned pathos fingering our compassionate nerve ends.

George is a writer in his forties who has taken up with a young woman, Sandy. Faith, his efficient and motherly wife, secretly knows about the affair; 13-year-old Sherry, the eldest daughter, even listens in on an adulterous phone conversation George improbably conducts from his house full of extension phones. As George agonizes downstairs with or without telephone, Faith and the three younger daughters are communally making up before her dresser mirror upstairs. The camera keeps cutting between George’s dejection below and the shared, genuine or heroically faked, bliss above. It is all too pat, studied, and wheedling: already we are supposed to pour our empathy into this marriage that is breaking up for reasons that will never be communicated.

JS

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John Simon

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From that initial sequence of shots in Shoot the Moon introducing us to the imposing, isolated farmhouse of George and Faith Dunlap and their four young daughters, we can tell we are in for pretension and fakery. It is a moist evening in Marin County, and as the camera, en route to the house, picks out darkling, abandoned objects, it lingers over an upturned child’s bicycle with one wheel still revolving. The music on the soundtrack (to be periodically repeated) is one insecure finger picking out on the piano “Don’t Blame Me.” The entire family is ensconced in the house; why is that spurned, forlorn wheel still spinning? What child’s, or merely childlike, finger is tentatively, touchingly disclaiming guilt? We never find out; it is all simply unearned pathos fingering our compassionate nerve ends.

George is a writer in his forties who has taken up with a young woman, Sandy. Faith, his efficient and motherly wife, secretly knows about the affair; 13-year-old Sherry, the eldest daughter, even listens in on an adulterous phone conversation George improbably conducts from his house full of extension phones. As George agonizes downstairs with or without telephone, Faith and the three younger daughters are communally making up before her dresser mirror upstairs. The camera keeps cutting between George’s dejection below and the shared, genuine or heroically faked, bliss above. It is all too pat, studied, and wheedling: already we are supposed to pour our empathy into this marriage that is breaking up for reasons that will never be communicated.