April 16, 1999
By Ted Anthony
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
The '60s are hurtling toward their end, and Pearl Kantrowitz (Diane Lane), a Jewish housewife from New York City, is feeling a bit penned in. She adores her kids but knows she had them too young. She loves her husband but wonders if he sees who she really is.
A gnawing feeling has taken root in Pearl's belly that life is passing her by and that the world, pushed by the tumult of the age, is moving at dizzying speed: The moon landing and Woodstock festival are just days away. The times are changing.
Thus the setting for ``A Walk on the Moon,'' a nuanced look at life in a Jewish bungalow colony in the late 1960s. The movie has the pace of one of the summers it chronicles, but cuts much deeper with its insights about how people make compromises - and how they cope with their choices.
Pearl, her young son and her adolescent daughter Alison (Anna Paquin, with a flawless American accent) head up to the Catskills for the July holiday; her husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), a TV repairman, stays behind in the city, furiously fixing televisions for the impending moon landing.
Freed from the confines of her urban apartment, Pearl begins to contemplate what she's been missing. Various sightings of hippies and images of the late 1960s - rock music, tie-dyed T-shirts - pique her interest and send her deeper into her self-review.
Meanwhile, one of the salesmen who passes through the bungalow community where the Kantrowitzes are staying catches her eye. Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), an itinerant blouse hawker who oozes counterculture from every pore, looks at Pearl in a way her husband never did - hungrily, openly. To Pearl, he is a conduit to worlds she has never experienced, and she falls with little resistance.
At the same time, Alison is experiencing sexual stirrings of her own and trying to gauge what they mean. At the onset of puberty, Alison is a walking, talking bunch of emotions and hormones, and she looks to her mother and her paternal grandmother (Tovah Feldshuh, who plays the film's conscience) to help her cope.
To say more about the plot itself would be a disservice, since its twists and turns add extraordinary texture to the tale. Suffice it to say that both the moon landing and Woodstock figure prominently in the unraveling of the Kantrowitz family - and in its members' ultimate, desperate attempt to keep their clan from collapsing entirely.
``A Walk on the Moon,'' sort of a Jewish/Catskills answer to the WASP/suburbia film ``The Ice Storm,'' is equally devastating in its chronicling of American discontent, especially the female variety. Pearl has love and security, and yet - like so many women of her era - she feels a gap deep inside, a dark spot she cannot define and cannot excise.
She feels that she missed her youth, and she sees a chance at liberation. She dives for it, not seeing - or at least not fully understanding - the damage she will wreak, especially in the eyes of her daughter. The script and the textured sense of place - the Catskills are rendered full of unblemished highways, quiet bungalows and people who derive joy simply by being together - are augmented by a series of wonderful performances.
Lane is just perfect as Pearl. Her every facial twitch, every glance, speaks to her internal conflict. Mortensen makes the ideal seductive hippie (and has in previous roles); his ability to ease from come-hither attractiveness into predatory sexuality is as unsettling as it is compelling.
Paquin, who won an Oscar for her supporting role in the 1993 film ``The Piano,'' enters a new phase of her young career, exhibiting the depth and subtlety and roiled emotions so typical of the American girl she isn't in real life. Her first make-out session is under a full moon - a moon populated, for the first time, with human beings.
And Schreiber makes a wonderful Marty, a man with a big heart and a big temper who ultimately must decide to do the right thing, whatever that is.
Peppered with quiet experiences and wonderful small moments (``Guys I can kiss; bacon is a different story,'' an orthodox girl says to Alison), ``A Walk on the Moon'' is a harrowing, attentive and unique look at what the end of the 1960s meant to a small group of people. And in that tale, on a small canvas, is a bit of wisdom for the ages.
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