THE MAN IN THE MOON
With Reese Witherspoon, Emily Warfield, Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, and Jason London.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Love’s dual nature is given full play in The Man in the Moon, the story of Dani Trant, a 14-year-old girl from Natchitoches County in rural Louisiana whose life is shaped equally by the hard livelihood her family wrests from the land and the ballads of Elvis Presley. Bored by the land’s dry routine and primed by Elvis’s husky promises, Dani (short for Danielle) is set for the potential romance that comes her way in the person of Court Foster, the 17-year-old boy who, along with his mother and younger siblings, moves to the adjacent farm.
The film opens like a fairy tale under a lunar spotlight, during an evening’s front-porch conversation between Dani and her older sister, Maureen. In the early summer heat the sisters compare the state of their lives, Dani envying the certainty of Maureen’s educational and romantic future as the older girl prepares to enter college, Maureen musing about the undefined discontent that has begun to mysteriously well up inside her.
These patterns are mirrored by Mulligan’s camera. His world is one of constant shifts and changes; his restless, prowling camera records even the simplest actions with a tracking shot–even if it’s just Dani’s mother crossing the yard to talk to one of her children–as if to mimic the interior motion of the characters, a process of relentless, almost involuntary change.
By keeping his camera between the audience and the action, Mulligan forces us to see things as the characters do. His handling of dramatic incidents, even melodramatic ones, takes place at a similar remove. For even though the film is filled with a week’s worth of soap-opera crises, these are not evoked for the impact they could have directly on the audience but for the catalytic effect they have on the characters. Mulligan doesn’t hype the horrors or thrills of this or that event, but carefully scrutinizes their emotional aftereffects, spurning the operating theater in favor of the waiting room.
