Yes, I'm throwing my own tiny Diane Lane Film Festival this week. What I remember from viewing this film several years ago, was primarily a really hot sexual encounter between Pearl (Diane Lane) and Walker (Viggo Mortensen) in a waterfall. What I'd forgotten was a very complex, multi-generational drama played out between interesting and engaging characters. It's a coming of age story for both a mother and her teenage daughter. Twined throughout this examination of a marriage in quiet turmoil is an alternately interfering and supportive mother/mother-in-law/grandmother who has visions of the future and makes a few dollars on the side reading tea leaves and tarot cards. The first time I saw A Walk on the Moon, I watched it with my husband. At a time when I was still laboring under the illusion that we were happy. Now that I have viewed it as a single woman four years past her divorce being final, I've come away from the experience with a much different perspective. Ten years ago, it was, WOW, sex with Viggo in a waterfall!! Today, well, yeah, it's still sex with Viggo in a waterfall. But it's also watching a marriage in crisis, a crisis that tests the marriage relationship to the breaking point. Lies. Violation of trust. Blinders that were formerly firmly in place are stripped away revealing unrealized dreams and unhappiness covered over by humor and distraction. It felt familiar. At the end we don't know for sure if Pearl and Marty are able to keep their marriage together. But we do see a desire to make that effort, to try to see each other in a new light and move forward with the lessons they have learned. It was hopeful. Reflecting on the fact that my own marriage did not survive its crises, I found myself rooting for their marriage to heal and persevere. And to mourn just a little bit not the failure of my marriage, but the complete lack of incentive to save it when the time came to make that decision. I had already lost hope. But I'm always happy for those who find it.
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