Review of Moonlight and Valentino

Introduction

Ellen Simon`s adaptation of her stage play is a dialogue-heavy study of a suddenly-widowed young woman (Elizabeth Perkins) as she comes to terms with her loss and starts to rebuild her life. In other words, a barrel of laughs. Curiously the movie is billed as a romantic drama-comedy, but I honestly found little more than mildly amusing in the movie. Perkins gets the opportunity to wallow thespianically in grief for a good half of the movie, surrounded by a strong supporting cast of Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kathleen Turner. Jon Bon Jovi gets his acting chops around the role of a housepainter who reawakens the passions of the young widow.

Film Review described the movie on its original release as "gently dreary", and I for one cannot argue with that. This Working Title production is one of those films that genuinely deserves to be dismissed as a "chick flick", although the women I know would give this slow-moving piece a wide berth.

Video

Beautifully photographed by Julio Macat in 2.35:1 Panavision, the film is rendered to disc as anamorphic widescreen. The image is satisfactory, if a little workmanlike with reasonable colour and contrast, but nothing genuinely exceptional.

Audio

The movie comes with a plain vanilla Dolby 2.0 Surround soundtrack which like the image is unremarkable. The score is by Lord of the Rings maestro Howard Shore, but isn`t one of his best.

Features

What extras? There are multilingual and hard-of-hearing subtitles, but they should come standard with movies rather than being regarded a special feature.

Conclusion

I`m having a lot of difficulty thinking of something to say about this movie, let alone something positive. If you like them slow and requiring the judicious application of hankies for a good sniffle and blow, you might get something out of this picture. Personally I find life depressing enough.