Original-Cin/Hollywood Suite Critic's Picks: Guest programmer Liam Lacey dissects the divorce classic Shoot the Moon
On the last Wednesday of the month, as part of a promotional partnership with Hollywood Suite, Original-Cin critics curate the programming of the service’s decades channels, choosing three features on each. Here, Liam Lacey dissects Shoot the Moon, one of his Hollywood Suite selections for June 24.
By Liam Lacey
What exactly do we mean when we say a movie from many years ago “holds up?” How do characters, story and visual style hold meaning for us, despite of, or in some cases because of, the changes in fashions, performance styles and values?
Part of the answer, I think, is that a film is a form of time travel, a documentary of the time it was made. As well, it’s a kind of special mirror to the present, one that points out some of our good points and flaws.
Diane Keaton and Albert Finney. Shoot the Moon is available on Hollywood Suite this month.
That brings me to one of my Hollywood Suite picks, Shoot the Moon, a movie that continues to feel alive because it was drawn from the creators’ own experiences, more than from movie conventions. The 1982 movie, directed by Alan Parker, stars Albert Finney and Diane Keaton, as a couple dealing with an acrimonious marriage break-down. For film fans, it’s on a short list of serious divorce dramas, including Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage, Robert Benton’s Kramer Vs. Kramer, Mike Nichols’ Heartburn, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation and Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.
Shoot the Moon isn’t a sociology lesson, though it reflects a social revolution in marriage that was taking place across the United States and around the world. In the U.S., for example, where less than 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, about 50% of couples who married in 1970 did. About half of the children born to married parents in the 1970s saw their parents split, compared to only about 11% of those born in the 1950s. To some degree, Shoot the Moon is an exploration of what was then a new social reality.
Shoot the Moon was the first screenplay written by Bo Goldman, known for stories of warmly messy humanity, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Rose, Melvin and Howard and Scent of a Woman.
Born in 1936, Goldman was the son of a wealthy New York department store owner. He first wrote for Broadway at 25 and spent the next 15 years trying to launch a still unproduced Civil War musical, under the shadow of bankruptcy while he and his wife attempted to support a family of six.
Goldman began writing the screenplay for Shoot the Moon at a time when his wife was threatening to move with the children from New England to California. But he also incorporated a wider view of his generation of parents:
"When I started to write this screenplay years ago,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, "I looked around me and all the marriages were collapsing. And the real victims of these marital wars were the children."
Through the 1970s, the script, originally called Switching, was Goldman’s calling card. Though generally deemed “unmakeable” it was an impressive enough writing sample to open the door for other writing jobs. Milos Foreman invited him to write the adaptation of Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won Oscars for best picture, director, actor (Jack Nicholson) and actress (Louise Fletcher).
Director Alan Parker
Subsequently, he turned down chances to write screenplays for two other family dramas, Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People, while his own screenplay languished. Eventually, the script was bought by 20th Century Fox, flush with new Star Wars money, in 1976, when Alan Parker became attached. It was a far more personal film for Parker, after his successes with Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express and Fame.
Parker said of his close relationship with screenwriter Goldberg: “Both married, with ten children between us, we poured our hearts out to one another, like a couple of shrinks lying on couches on opposite sides of a room.”
Subsequently, Fox balked at the $12-million budget and the movie moved on to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who agreed to do the film if Parker signed Diane Keaton, a hot commodity after her Oscar-win for Annie Hall (1977).
The film involved personal stakes for the actors as well. Shoot the Moon was one of four movies Finney shot that year after a six-year hiatus when he focused on stage-work. He was then on the heels of his second marriage to French actress Anouk Aimee. Two decades before, Finney’s first two roles, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), established him as a bed-hopping rogue, a role he played in his real life with a string of high-profile affairs.
"I had to dig into myself. When you have to expose yourself and use your own vulnerability, you can get a little near the edge. Scenes where Diane Keaton and I really have to go at each other reminded me of times when my own behavior has been monstrous."
Finney, plays George Dunlap, a middle-aged, recently successful sports writer, who is about to attend an awards banquet at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel. He and Faith (Keaton), live in a rambling Victorian house with their four school-age daughters in Marin County, about 35 miles from San Francisco. Shot in the rainy winter, the movie deliberately undermines the stereotype of care-free sunny California. (For contrast, see Serial, Bill Persky’s 1980 Marin County-set film, a satiric divorce movie starring Martin Mull).
The day after the banquet, Faith throws George out of the house. He has been carrying on an affair with another woman, played by Karen Allen (whose character is the film’s one nod to the self-centered New Age vibe). Thirteen-year-old daughter Sherry (Dana Hill, later in National Lampoon’s European Vacation) takes it the hardest, refusing to speak to her father at all, though the three younger girls are open to having him co-parent, driving them to school or taking them to his beach house for a weekend.
Keaton, a decade younger than Finney, plays what is possibly her most complex role in Shoot the Moon, plumbing for deeper moments than her roles as Michael Corleone’s wife in the Godfather movies, or as Woody Allen’s eccentric comic muse. When she shot Shoot the Moon, she had just finished the movie, Reds, and had ended her relationship with Warren Beatty.
There are some characteristic Keaton behaviours – the evasive self-deprecation, and moments of steely resistance. Keaton appears to visibly age or grow younger in different scenes, alternatively crushed by her husband’s betrayal or renewed when she wins the attentions of a young construction worker (Peter Weller) who’s building a tennis court.
There’s not much on record about Keaton’s experience of the film, though Goldman says she wrote him copious, insightful notes for her character. Alan Parker wrote in a blog that working with Keaton was one of the highlights of his career, though he noted that Keaton barely mentioned the film in her biography, beyond listing it among her movies that did poorly at the box office.
And how does it “hold up?” In retrospect, there are a couple of Jewish characters – a fawning publicist, ruthless divorce lawyers who seem crudely stereotyped (arguably an in-joke from screenwriter Goldman, who is also Jewish).
More centrally, the film’s focus on George’s rage, his sense of displacement, and violent reaction to the estrangement of his children, which may raise different kinds of red flags for audiences than it did in 1982. But we shouldn’t be too condescending toward the past. David Denby, in his 1982 review for New York Magazine, noted that some women in the audience hissed at the movie’s ending.
Seen through the distance of almost four decades, it’s also possible to see George as a man born during the War or pre-War era: He’s an emotionally locked-in, old school sports writer, a bit of a fading ladies’ man, marinated in a culture of masculine competition. He lashes out in a way that, if not broadly socially condoned, was tacitly accepted.
One area where Shoot the Moon seems more true than many contemporary films, is that it makes no reductive effort to explain why the Dunlaps’ marriage went wrong.: Boredom, resentment, envy, and disappointment are all involved, as well as Faith’s exhaustion and George’s struggle to find the time and isolation to make a living, while surrounded by a the chaos of a young family.
Also, the film gets the kids right. Both Kramer Vs. Kramer and Marriage Story make a dramatic meal out of the custody arrangement for one adorable moppet. By contrast, the Dunlaps are always on the verge of attempting to repress a household revolution.
The four daughters act as audience, background chorus, interrogators and judges over the parents’ angry conflict. Critic Paul Kael, in her original New Yorker review, compared the kids to a troupe of “vaudevillians.” They often appear on screen like a moving bundle of humanity, tumbling through doorways, spilling drinks and piling on sofas.
They serve as a reality check and constant reminder that children are a living counter-argument to the notion of parents putting their own needs first.
Liam Lacey’s Critics Picks on Hollywood Suite
‘70s (and earlier) – Cactus Flower (1969, Sony Pictures Television Canada), The End of the Affair (1955) Sony Pictures Television Canada, Death in Venice (1971) Warner Films Canada.
‘80s – Fatal Attraction (1987) Paramount, War of the Roses (1989) 20th Century Fox, Shoot the Moon (1982), Warner Films Canada.
‘90s – Single White Female (1999) Sony Pictures Television Canada, The Crying Game (1992) Entertainment One Films Canada Inc., The End of the Affair (1999) Sony Pictures Television Canada.
2000s – Blue Valentine (2011) Entertainment One Films Canada Inc., Gone Girl (2014) 20th Century Fox, You Can Count on Me (2000) Elevation Pictures.