Moonlight Mile (2002)

Right down to scoring the trailer with the insistent piano of Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Moonlight Mile works a combination of nostalgia, grief, and uplift, trying to activate the tear ducts while lodging in the viewer's store of sentimental favorites. It almost succeeds. Brad Silberling's follow-up to City of Angels, Moonlight Mile invokes a handful of recent hits, filtering the subject matter of In the Bedroom through the out-of-time design quirks of The Royal Tenenbaums, as well as Wonder Boys' 70s soundtrack and comfort-of-home familiarity. It has too many Hollywood concessions to straddle that line between independence and accessibility, but the film does abandon some of its predecessor's more maudlin and squishy moments. Judging from his work in 2001 and 2002, Jake Gyllenhaal has patented the hipster savant with saucer eyes and messy cowlicks; this is his most effective work in that role. Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon bring their Oscar credentials to the fore in splendid ways, especially Sarandon as the more complex of the two grieving parents. The post-traumatic emotional fumbling of the leads almost ties the film together, but when the script strays from their uneasy pseudo-family dynamic, it loses focus. Despite a charismatic performance from newcomer Ellen Pompeo, a young Renée Zellweger, her romance with Gyllenhaal feels beside the point, as does the murder trial subplot involving Holly Hunter as a pushy DA. It's no coincidence these scenes also contain Silberling's most derivative writing. A more mature accomplishment than City of Angels, Moonlight Mile still has some distance to go to achieve transcendence. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide