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The Man in the Moon
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1. A Movies-on-VHS Review (1993)
The Man in the Moon – the penultimate
film of Robert Mulligan (To Kill a
Mockingbird [1962], Summer of '42 [1971]) – is a quiet, classical film, old-fashioned in the best sense. Mulligan
long ago ceased to be a topical or fashionable director; his fitting response
has been to create lyrical, self-contained fictional worlds in which tender,
timeless rites of emotional passage take place.
The Man in the Moon revisits the adolescent,
coming-of-age territory of Summer of '42,
but this time from a largely female perspective. Dani (Reese Witherspoon) and
Maureen (Emily Warfield) are sisters united by the depth of their intimacy, but
divided by differences in age and experience. They both become involved with
the new boy on the adjacent farm, Court (Jason London).
As often in Mulligan's films, details of the natural
environment (rural Louisiana in the 1950s) and the relationships between the
adults at the edge of the story are subtly conveyed but all-important.
There is traumatic pain, sexual awakening and domestic
violence in this tale, but Mulligan films it with tact, from a respectful
distance. His regard upon events, conveyed in every detail of camerawork,
setting and performance, is one of compassionate reflectiveness.
The story is told through repeated everyday gestures –
such as Dani running through the woods – which come to express a rich range of
moods and meanings. The Man in the Moon is a moving example of small, finely wrought cinema.
2. A PhD Chapter: Balance and Linkage (2006)
Anyone could learn a lot about
the art and craft of film direction from the first five-and-a-half minutes of
Robert Mulligan’s The Man in the Moon.
It opens in darkness. The voice
of a young teenage girl – Dani (Reese Witherspoon in an early role) – is heard,
singing indistinctly to herself. Then the sound of a disc being put onto a
turntable and played, which reveals the identity of the song: Elvis Presley’s
“Loving You”. Meanwhile, the darkness has been revealed as a bit of black sky,
and a subsequent movement in this image reveals stars, planets and, in
particular, a brightly shining moon.
We are heading down – through
treetops – to a house in the rural Louisiana in the 1950s, the primary setting
of the film’s action. The sound of Elvis song is subtly but decisively altered,
rendered more diegetically tinny in tone as we approach the curious back porch
that doubles as a bedroom for Dani.
Via a careful dissolve, the
camera movement reaches ground level and takes us in closer still. A
portrait-in-motion of two sisters: Dani and the older Maureen (Emily Warfield).
The whole scene rests – but very naturally, even casually so – on the dance of
separation and togetherness, attraction and repulsion, between these two
characters: each seems to occupy their own zone of the porch, in their own way
(Dani lies down beside her eventually-revealed phonograph, Maureen walks
about), until eventually they will be united in a close-up two-shot. The
dialogue by Jenny Wingfield (the script is apparently autobiographical) quickly
weaves a Terrence Malick-style, repetitive, singsong structure that, for now,
hides its deeper, poetic resonances within a stylisation of everyday, banal
chitchat:
Dani: I love Elvis so much!
Maureen: You love everybody so much.
Dani: I do not.
Maureen: You do, too.
Dani: No, I don’t.
Maureen: OK, you don’t.
Dani: Well, I don’t. Maureen, sometimes you make me
feel like such a baby.
Maureen: You are a baby.
Dani: I wish I could be just like you.
Maureen: Don’t talk silly.
Dani: It’s not silly.
What gets weighed up in and by
this opening scene? A great deal: darkness and vision, the stars and the earth,
the cosmos and one family, diegetic and extra-diegetic materials, the wide
world and the internal emotions of two individuals. And also the intimate,
intricate relation of similarity and difference between two sisters – two women
who, in the course of the plot, will both fall for (and, in a sense, share) the
same man (Jason London as Court), but in ways that reveal their respective
ages, temperaments and levels of experience. All these relations of scale, all
these subtle distinctions and gradations, are laid out for us in Mulligan’s
apparently simple, matter-of-fact organisation of the prologue.
Luc Moullet once proposed that
the cinema of François Truffaut could be appreciated as an art of balance and linkage. (1) That is to say, not a cinema of striking, detachable
moments or strong, set-piece sequences, but of the relations between all the elements – where these elements in
themselves may not be at all spectacular, but the meaning and force they convey
derives entirely from their overall context in the entire film. Truffaut,
Mulligan, Jacques Tourneur, Monte Hellman, even Fritz Lang in his quieter, late
American films of the 1950s: these are filmmakers whose work is characterised,
on the surface at least, by a certain smoothness, what Kent Jones has described
(in relation to Hellman) as “a feel for mood and overall tone rather than
dramatic attack”. (2) And because this smoothness is unostentatious – because
it does not stand up and announce itself like the stylistic effects in Jean-Luc Godard or Brian De Palma – it can easily, unfairly be underrated as conventional,
unadventurous, bland, telemovie-like. Even Elvis’ “Loving You” is a remarkably
muted song-performance: a sure sign of Mulligan’s aesthetic preferences and
decisions at work.
In applying Moullet’s terms of
balance and linkage to the work of Mulligan, I believe they can be fruitfully
recast as (respectively) modulation and transition. Mulligan’s style –
apparently so effortless to the untrained eye – consists of subtly passing
through the different moods of a scene or a situation, and ensuring, as a net
result, an equal, even weight and distribution to these various stages. It
helps, in appreciating Mulligan, to bring in from the field of theatrical
dramaturgy the theory of steps in a
scene: the discrete phases or building blocks that the director and actors
define in order to give it structure, form, colour, rhythm, and that shifting constellation
which Brian Henderson once called (in reference to Orson Welles) “a delicate and
precise sequence of emotions”. (3)
Within scenes, Mulligan
modulates. Indeed, few directors have shown such mastery of so many devices for
mood-modulation. Music, for example: not only does Mulligan put the samples (of
Elvis and other pop standards) in a clear, limpid place in the film’s overall
structure; he also holds off for a full eight-and-three-quarter minutes before
introducing the first note of James Newton Howard’s folk-orchestral score. The
result of such overall restraint is that, when he does punch in music cues, it
counts as a major mood-shifter – for example, that first Howard cue accompanies
the splash Dani makes as she dives into the water for the first time.
Another seemingly conventional
scene technique that Mulligan uses sparingly and for maximum expressivity is
the gradual découpage or
shot-breakdown that, once a shot/reverse-shot volley for a dialogue exchange
has been established, not only takes us closer in, but also progressively sets
the background into an out-of-focus blur: such focalisation always serves an
intense (and often fleeting) surge of emotion, as in the kissing scenes between
Dani and Court.
Across scenes, Mulligan carefully
engineers transitions. Again, it can seem TV-like, this penchant for beginning
a scene on an insert of a physical action, accompanied by its sharp sound; or
employing a leisurely lap dissolve from one establishing shot of a location to
another. But even these apparently simple instances of craft have an expressive
dimension in Mulligan. Always at stake is a specific mood and the tension it
involves: passing from lightness to darkness, from cramped interior space to
airy outdoor space, from noise to silence – in all imaginable permutations and
combinations – brings with it emotional affects of release or dread, relaxed
contemplation or quickening involvement.
Consider a peculiarly affecting transition.
Matthew (Sam Waterston) at the hospital, in close-up, exits the frame; Mulligan
lingers for a moment on the white wall. From this effectively empty frame we
pass, in a lap dissolve, to a blurred shot of falling rain. In this stunning
transition – where the televisual mingles with Yasujiro Ozu’s depopulated
interiors and the colour-field effects of Stan Brakhage or Philippe Grandrieux – we glimpse the touch of abstraction inside the concreteness of Mulligan’s
style, the non-figurative inside the figurative.
To the two terms of modulation
and transition, I would add a third: articulation.
Like Douglas Sirk, Mulligan loves to build a narrative architecture on all
manner of contrasts and comparisons, echoes and affinities, that are gently
insisted upon by the work of mise en scène and montage. For instance, the Dani/Maureen
relationship is echoed by the close tie between the mother, Abigail (Tess
Harper) and her long-time friend (Gail Strickland) – it’s easy to miss the
off-hand line informing us that the father, Matthew, dated the latter before he
chose the former. Another motif that receives such an articulation – this time
more on the dialogue level – is the notion of knowing: Dani says to her father (in a sequence discussed below) “I
know how you feel”; she makes the intimate, sexual declaration to Court, “I
wanna know you more, all I can”; and she cuts him off with the dismissive “I
already understand” – where what is at stake, every time, is precisely the
different sorts of understanding (or misunderstanding, or complete lack of
understanding) involved in what Dani imagines she knows. This is a fine
articulation of the universal story element of adolescent emotional confusion.
Large-scale articulation in
Mulligan proceeds by the already-noted interplay of similarity and difference.
The opening scene announces the importance of the family home as the central
location of the drama. It is, itself, a marvel of expressive production design:
like the farmer’s dwelling in the middle of the field in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), it is a home almost
without a centre or even an inside, so open it seems, so porous – considering
how easily it is invaded or intruded upon by outside arrivals (bodies, cars),
and how swiftly Dani (in particular) flies through it to reach the outdoors
(even the positioning of her bed on its outer porch-edge tells us how little
integrated into this home she is).
But even more important than the
ambience of this place as a freestanding structure is the way in which Mulligan
works it into his succession of shots and scenes. Indeed, the seemingly
conventional establishing shots of this house – repeated at regular intervals
throughout the story – mark and cover an extraordinary range of states and
moods. Extending the map of the film a little – but not terribly far in
strictly realistic, geographical terms – we can see that this same/different
ringing of moods covers the house, the watering hole, and the distance
in-between that Dani variously walks or runs, day or night. The diversified repetition
of such seemingly ordinary gestures is what gives Mulligan’s films their shape,
meaning and emotion.
It is tempting, in this light, to
label Mulligan’s restrained style classical – and, indeed, to rank him in the crest-line of cinema’s classicists, alongside
Jacques Becker, Howard Hawks and Clint Eastwood. Thirteen years ago (see the short review above), after first seeing The Man in the Moon on video (it had sadly bypassed theatrical
distribution in Australia), I called it a “moving example of small,
finely-wrought cinema” and a “quiet, classical film, old-fashioned in the best
sense”:
There is traumatic pain, sexual awakening and domestic
violence in this tale, but Mulligan films it with tact, from a respectful
distance. His regard upon events, conveyed in every detail of camerawork,
setting and performance, is one of compassionate reflectiveness.
Now, being able to study the film
more closely on DVD, I see the limitation of this impressionistic (and somewhat
mystical) cinephilic notion of the director’s regard – as if the entire piece was shot from that single
“respectful distance”! – and am more intent on trying to break down,
analytically, the intricate secrets of Mulligan’s craft.
I am also wary of the
assimilation of Mulligan to an unspecified and undefined notion of classicism –
especially of the Classical Hollywood variety. Miriam Hansen has queried the
paradigm of American classicism in cinema bequeathed to us by the extensive
historical work of David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Janet Staiger and others.
In her view, the particular values that they espouse as eternally and
universally classical – clarity, organic proportion, symmetry, linearity,
centring, “cool control” (or, in my case, “tact”) – are more properly grasped
as quite historically specific neo-classical standards derived from the canon of eighteenth-century aesthetics. (4) And,
indeed, it is hard to square any stable notion of Classical Hollywood with a
field of production that encouraged, within a few short decades, the extremely
varied stylistic options taken up by John Ford and Frank Tashlin, Henry Hathaway
and Samuel Fuller, Tod Browning and Douglas Sirk, Ernst Lubitsch and Nicholas Ray.
So-called American classicism
begs for a new theory – and this goes every bit as much for Mulligan as for
more obviously expressionistic (Vincente Minnelli) or cartoonish (George
Sidney) directors. Andrew Britton, in his critique of Bordwell and the so-called
Wisconsin school of film scholarship, prefers to see the great age of Hollywood
cinema as a complex extension of Romanticism, both as an aesthetic form and a
cultural politics:
[M]ost of the traditions grabbed – the assorted romanticisms
and modernisms, psychoanalysis, melodrama, variety and vaudeville, that mongrel
form “the bourgeois novel” itself – are not any in significant sense of the
word classical. On the contrary, they
are all, in their different ways, products of that complex cultural process
initiated by the Romantic movement in the course of which the notion of
cultural decorum established, and so rigorously enforced by the Enlightenment,
was progressively undermined. (5)
In the case of Mulligan, this
re-orientation toward a Romantically-inflected classicism would mean freeing
our apprehension of his style from straitjacketing, specious notions of
naturalism or (even worse) realism – as I believe Bordwell himself strives to
do in many cases. The unostentatious nature of art that is deemed to be
classical is too often, and too quickly, equated with self-effacing or
invisible art – that famous “style that does not want to be noticed as a style”
– and, from there, commentators rarely move beyond the assumption of a mise en scène that must only be somehow
direct, plain, merely presenting the evidence (the kind of notion that has
blocked analysis of the style of Hawks or Roberto Rossellini for decades).
Instead, a Romanticist
orientation would direct us to what is subtly unreal or even irreal within the modulations,
transitions and articulations of Mulligan’s films – watch again, on
freeze-frame, those quasi-abstract transitions, or listen one more time to that
prologue, how Dani and her Elvis record begin (against any strict logic) in
“audio close-up” over shots of the night sky, only then becoming sonically
muffled and far-away as the camera approaches its human subjects – and, above
all, grasping not only what is expressive here, but indeed lyrical. Mulligan –
no less than Elia Kazan or Malick – is a lyric poet of the cinema; but
lyricism, sadly, remains among the least recognised and analysed phenomena in
this medium, even as the deeply-felt lyric affect is what binds us to a work
like The Man in the Moon, whether as
passing spectators or devoted fans.
Britton stresses that Classical
Hollywood cinema “has its decorum, but it is the decorum of an art form which
was, and was felt to be, intrinsically indecorous”. (6) There is a central
concatenation of scenes within the lush rural setting of The Man in the Moon that serves to remind us, especially, of the
Kazan who made such full-blown lyric melodramas as Wild River (1960) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). This particular passage allows Wingfield’s story to touch upon – and
also gracefully leave behind – the difficult-to-handle, potentially sensational
topic of domestic abuse.
When the motor of the narrative
kicks in – and it bravely takes its long, leisurely time in doing so – Dani’s
lightly transgressive actions (sneaking off to see Court) inadvertently trigger
a hospital crisis for the pregnant Abigail. Matthew’s rage and despair in the
face of this compels him to march home and immediately start beating Dani –
with only the entreaty from Maureen, and the shame of him precisely being seen
in this act, deterring further violence. (Note here another major axis of
articulation in Mulligan: who sees and is seen, as contrasted with who remains
alone and unseen, for example Dani at the hospital). The next afternoon (cued
by a palpably relieving night-to-day transition), Dani and Matthew are sitting
together in the family’s truck. Dani breaks the tense silence with a candid
piece of character analysis: ‘I know you feel bad about taking the strap to me
… You were scared, I know that.’ He does not respond; he keeps brooding. Then –
in an impulsive, ambiguous gesture that seems to promise further menace or
abuse – he gets out the truck, slams the door, and comes right around the truck
to the passenger side. What we then see is a father-daughter embrace of the
sort that Matthew has literally held back from in all his earlier scenes with
Dani.
The “delicate and precise
sequence of emotions” traced here offers almost a thermodynamic whirl of
trans-personal sentiments, passions, affections and drives, the kind of “ball
of fire” that André Bazin saw racing between characters in Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach (1947) (7): a
kind of ledger or balance-sheet where the violence that emerges as a
displacement of grief finds its countervailing force in the welling-up of a
hitherto repressed paternal love.
Balance and linkage: isn’t that,
in the end, what The Man in the Moon is really all about? The film comes close to saying it outright, in the only
bit of moral-drawing sermonising that Mulligan allows into proceedings: Matthew
telling Dani, out on the fishing boat, that, in life, one has to learn to
recognise the pain of another person, beyond the intense and immediate
sensation of one’s own suffering. When the characters in this story establish
the links – when they can themselves make the connections and see the diagrams
of echo and interrelation between them – then a certain kind of peaceful,
reassuring balancing-act can occur, however temporary it may be (the final word
of the film is “always”, but the mood is heartbreakingly fragile).
And that’s why The Man in the Moon must end – after the
penultimate balancing of life and death, past and present, in the beautiful
embrace of the two sisters at Court’s graveside – with an epilogue which
answers, as in a mirror, the prologue: the girls, again on the porch, talk of
that imaginary Man above, and a camera movement that takes us, this time, back
and up to the luminous moon in the night sky … Is this simply the spectre of
classicism again, the formal principle of narrative closure, of “the end
answering the beginning”, as Raymond Bellour once described it? (8) I would
prefer to think of it as a humanism – a particular, precious kind of human
wisdom that we find expressed and embodied, with a tough Romantic lyricism, in
Robert Mulligan’s best films.
1. Luc Moullet (1988), “La
Balance et le lien”, reprinted in his Piges
choisies (de Griffith à Ellroy (Paris: Capricci, 2009). back
2. Kent Jones, “’The Cylinders
Were Whispering My Name’: The Films of Monte Hellman”, in Thomas Elsaesser,
Alexander Horwath and Noel King (eds.), The
Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p. 192; on “the dynamic, vital
and analytical movement given to the narrative as a whole” in Lang, see
Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier, 50 ans de cinéma américain (Paris: Nathan, 1995), pp. 609-611. back
3. Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1980), p. 55. For an illuminating discussion of the dramaturgical
concept of steps as related to the film actor’s craft, see John Flaus, “Thanks
For Your Heart, Bart”, Continuum (special
issue on Film – Matters of Style),
Vol. 5 No. 2 (1992), pp. 179-224; available on-line at: http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/5.2/Flaus.html. back
4. Miriam Hansen, “Classical Hollywood and the Mass Production of the Senses”, lecture given at University of Melbourne, 15 November 1996. Published as “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 6. No. 2 (April 1999): 59-77; and L. Williams & C. Gledhill (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000). back 5. Andrew Britton, “The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and ‘The Classical Style’”, in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), p. 456. Britton’s source for this understanding of Romanticism is Charles Rosen & Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984). back 6. Britton, Ibid. back 7. André Bazin, Jean Renoir (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1973), pp. 98-99. For further discussion of this brief but suggestive
text, see my Mysteries of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). back
8. Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond
Bellour”, Camera Obscura, no. 3/4
(1979), pp. 76-83. See also the essays collected in Bellour, The Analysis of Film (Indiana University
Press, 2002). back
© Adrian Martin June 1993 / September 2006 |
