Sex, Drugs and Chicken Soup

By RICHARD CORLISS

Perhaps you remember the episode of The Honeymooners where the Kramdens take a break from their marital fractiousness to go out dancing. When they get home, they warmly recall the sweet savor of their romantic prime. Ralph and Alice were, what--33, 35? Yet they saw their good old days as past; the greatest thrill they could have at their advanced age was to reminisce.

A 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 end in her undramatic life story.

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!

The movie, written by Pamela Gray and directed by Tony Goldwyn, stretches plausibility to the snapping point. (In Woodstock, an impromptu city of 300,000 people that weekend, what are the odds you'd spot your mom with the blouse man? And, at the time of the moon landing, wasn't everyone talking about another little event that happened that weekend--Chappaquiddick?) It also lays on the Kantrowitzes' ethnicity too heavily; they are like chicken soup that's all schmaltz.

So you 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.

--By Richard Corliss