Word: pearls
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Actor Tony Goldwyn (most commonly known as the bad guy in Ghost) makes his directorial debut with this film. The story centers around Perl (Diane Lane), the film's symbol of change and uncertainty. Pearl's family spends every summer at a bungalow colony in the Catskills. Her husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), is forced to spend most of his time away from the family at work. As always, the absence of the husband conveniently opens the door for the infidelity of the wife, a pattern that plays out to perfection when Pearl becomes involved with an enigmatic blouse-seller named...
...Walk on the Moon, set in the summer of 1969, raises similar issues: How young can you get old? And can you get young again? Pearl Kantrowitz (Diane Lane), who is maybe 32, thinks she's an old lady because she has a tepid husband Marty (Liev Schreiber) and a daughter Alison (Anna Paquin) who at 14 is revving up for the sexual adventures Pearl never enjoyed. She says of Alison, "I just hope she doesn't end up like us." Poor Pearl. In a Catskills bungalow not far from Woodstock, she feels she's already come to a dead...
Enter romantic possibility--or, in a coming-of-middle-age tale like this, inevitability--in the lank person of Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), a peddler they call "the blouse man." While the others watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, Pearl is in the back of the blouse man's truck becoming a giddy, blossoming girl again. A few weeks later, she goes with him to Woodstock, gets baptized in Day-Glo body paint and is spotted by a horrified Alison. My mother--the hippie whore...
...look past the gaffes and cliches into the heart of the performances. Here you find Paquin lending a tough intelligence to Alison's confusions; and Lane so all-American gorgeous she needn't act to be the center of every shot. She does act, though, and nicely. She locates Pearl's yearning in vagrant sighs and in sidelong glances at the big world exploding, outside her small one, into sex, drugs and eternal adolescence...
Campbell also noted the reluctance of the United States to act decisively regarding these divisions. Comparing the present situation to the U.S.'s late entrance into the World War Two, she asked, "How do we make the US take notice? There are worse things happening than Pearl Harbor...