The back-and-forth that ensues isn’t just a war of the sexes but a war of wills as Ian tries to talk his way out of a bad situation and Louise holds firm, even baking the cookies Ian adores. Upon her discovery, Louise takes action by duct-taping Ian and holding him prisoner in the house, hoping he’ll come to his senses. Maybe we’ve seen Louise before, in characters played by Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep and others, but Ryan makes Louise a ballsy, believable bitch to behold. Not a nice farewell gesture to his wife of 13 years. This, she soon learns after a startled Ian arrives, is in anticipation of his young mistress, Sara (Kristen Bell), whom he expects to whisk off to Paris the next day.
Meg Ryan is terrific as high-powered Manhattan lawyer Louise, who, visiting a day early the country house she and husband Ian (Timothy Hutton) share, discovers the premises strewn with lovely flower pedals. Shelly was murdered by a construction worker in her apartment building, who then tried to cover up the crime as her suicide.Taylor Swift Reveals Her Writing Process In Nashville Songwriter Awards Speech One sinister element in the otherwise-light comedy is the brutality of the outdoor worker, who beats Ian when he sees the bound man can’t resist.
DP Nancy Schreiber makes the basic ingredients look good, especially if you like lots of close-ups of Meg Ryan. Hutton plays Ian as the humbled hapless weak-end of a power relationship, trapped in his own schemes.Ĭecil Gentry’s production design gets the details right in the rich couple’s home, which the thugs destroy. As Sarah, Bell captures the overconfidence of the pert and naïve mistress, ready-made for the second wives’ club. Ryan, as the ballsy lawyer faced with the first defeat of her life, makes Ian’s cheating somehow seem understandable. The best laughs come when the three are bound in the bathroom – Ian on the toilet, and the two women, with hands and ankles taped, fighting on the floor. Shelly’s bare-boned script, constructed around the extreme bondage situation (the story’s only element of surprise), enables Ryan, Hutton and Bell to explore their situation as if they’re all in a drama class improvisation.
#SERIOUS MOONLIGHT TV#
Hines, best known for her role as Larry David’s wife on TV’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, directs in a confined space in a way that makes Serious Moonlight look like a TV drama, or a film of a theatre performance. The three then proceed to battle out their differences.Įchoing The Ref at some moments, Straw Dogs at others, this is a bedroom farce that’s a bathroom farce. Sarah is also bound there when she returns to the house. A drunken lawn worker (Long) who finds Ian, ransacks the house, binding Louise with him in the bathroom. Ian won’t budge on his decision, so Louise knocks him out and first ties him to a chair, and then a toilet, with heavy duct tape while she tries to change his mind. But they’re not for her: instead they’re for his much younger girlfriend Sarah (Bell) for whom he is planning a romantic weekend in Paris followed by a proposal of marriage. When corporate lawyer Louise (Ryan) arrives at her country house to surprise her husband Ian (Hutton), she finds flower petals strewn on the floor. Despite appearances from Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton, the film will probably be seen as a curiosity, and is unlikely to achieve the near-$20m domestic haul of Shelly’s own Waitress, which she wrote and directed. The theatrical future of Serious Moonlight is likely to be limited to festivals and the arthouse circuit in the US, where Shelly made her career. As a comedy, however, it plays like a work in progress. This is Hines’s adaptation of Adrienne Shelly’s script and a posthumous tribute to the murdered actress with whom she worked on 2007’s Waitress. Serious Moonlight, Cheryl Hines’s directorial debut, is a comedy about husband held hostage in his home by the wife he plans to leave.
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