'Moonlight' Grieves and Loves, Hollywood-Style

Calculation and sincerity struggle for the soul of "Moonlight Mile," always an unequal combat when Hollywood is the battleground. What's on screen is too honest and from the heart to totally dismiss but too slick and contrived to completely embrace. This is a film that cares about genuine emotion but also wants to tame it, to tidy it up and keep it confined to quarters.

Set in the fictional town of Cape Anne, Mass., in 1973, "Moonlight Mile" focuses on the effects of an event we never see: the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time murder of a young woman named Diana Floss, a bystander killed when a deranged man turns a gun on his wife.

Left to sort through the emotional wreckage are Diana's stunned fiance, Joe Nast (Jake Gyllenhaal), and her equally distraught parents, commercial real estate agent Ben Floss (Dustin Hoffman) and his writer wife, JoJo (Susan Sarandon).

How they deal with this unexpected catastrophe, the choices they have to make about direction for the rest of their lives, is the territory writer-director Brad Silberling wants to explore.

Silberling, as has been widely reported, has such an event in his own past: His girlfriend, actress Rebecca Schaeffer, was murdered by a stalker in 1989. But even without knowing those specifics, it's possible to feel a reality behind many of the film's themes, notions like how critical tart gallows humor is to survival.

Silberling has dedicated the film to "all our loves, departed or yet to arrive" and has called what he's done "the literalization of emotions" that he and Schaeffer's parents felt, a summation that sounds about right.

But Silberling also previously directed the Meg Ryan-Nicolas Cage "City of Angels" as well as "Casper," audience-friendly films that grossed a total of $500 million. He can dive deeply into love and death, but his practiced style also means he is just the kind of smooth operator the studio system is looking for.

Joe Nast and the Flosses (a truly dreadful name) are introduced on the morning of Diana's funeral. Joe has been staying with his future in-laws for some weeks, preparing for a wedding that is now not to be and a trip to Italy that will never take place. His life has been thrown for a terrible loop, and he is increasingly desperate to figure out just what he should be doing with his future.