October 13, 1995
Movies

MADE OF CHEESE

THE SAPPY 'MOONLIGHT' IS ONE SMALL STEP FOR WOMANKIND


Review by Ken Tucker

I am usually the most sensitive of men, given to spending
hours admiring pink sunsets and tickling the tummies of
kittens. But as I watched the new weepie MOONLIGHT AND
VALENTINO (Gramercy, R), I started feeling like Jean-Claude
Van Damme on a bad-chest-hair day. After enduring 105
minutes of dripping bathroom candles and drippy self-
realization dialogue, I yearned to crush a beer can on the
forehead of the nearest construction worker. In Moonlight,
Elizabeth Perkins plays Rebecca, who's abruptly widowed
and left to the loving care of her sister (Gwyneth Paltrow),
her friend (Whoopi Goldberg), and her ex-stepmother (Kathleen
Turner in a haircut buzzed enough to be mistaken for Van
Damme's). Each one helps Rebecca through the crisis of her
grief in her own unique way (Paltrow, goofy-tentative;
Goldberg, sassy and brassy; Turner, pushily and with that
unplaceable annoying accent you know damn well she didn't
have in Body Heat). These women bond ferociously--they cry,
laugh, smoke cigarettes, drink white wine, and then do all
that stuff all over again. Yet it seems that Rebecca will
never become truly happy again.

That is, until she meets a cute housepainter played by rocker
Jon Bon Jovi, whose rear end serves the same function in this
movie that Pamela Anderson Lee's chest does on Baywatch--an
inescapable force of nature bringing joy wherever its rounded
spheres may go. Bon Jovi's character gets Rebecca to loosen up,
to live life to the fullest, which for her means eating a slice
of oozy pizza without using a fork and knife! Yes, the painter
also becomes a part of Rebecca's healing process. All the
actors here strive to give their cliches some backbone.
Moonlight and Valentino, written gamely, earnestly by Ellen
Simon and directed tidily, preciously by David Anspaugh, gives
sentimentality a worse name than it already has.


Grade:  D+

--Ken Tucker