by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Box of
Moonlight (though the imdb.com entry
on it spells the last word of the title as two words, Moon Light), a production that though made in 1996 definitely
has the “vibe” of a 1970’s film. It’s one of those movies that doesn’t
immediately make clear what the dramatic issue is going to be, but the gimmick
is that Al Fountain (John Turturro) is away from his home in Chicago with his
wife Deb (Annie Corley) and son Bobby (Alexander Goodwin) on a job assignment.
He’s an electrical engineer for Zeus Turbines and he’s installing huge turbines
to generate electricity for a plant that’s going to make windshield wipers —
only just when he and his crew have got the turbines installed, the company
they were hired by pulls the plug on the whole project, leaving an abandoned
factory with a lot of spanking new turbines and nothing for them to power. It’s
shortly before the Fourth of July, and writer-director Tom DiCillo establishes
that Al is a martinet by having him break up a game of some sort (involving
feet and a small, hard-rubber puck-like ball) his workers were playing. Then we
learn his workers know he’s a
martinet when they invite him to a poker game in a room of the hotel where
they’re staying, and he gets as far as the front room of their suite, overhears
them talking about him and using words like “asshole,” and slinks now. Now,
guess what happens? Al decides to stay in the area (its precise geographical
location is unstated, but the film was actually shot in and around Knoxville,
Tennessee) and locate Splatchee Lake, a resort where he spent a weekend as a child.
He remembers the lake because it had a big slide mounted in the middle; you had
to swim through the lake to get to the slide, but once you climbed to the top
of it and slid down, it was built in such a way that your body literally flew
over the water until gravity overcame inertia and you fell into the lake again.
He finds the lake, but he also finds an evangelical minister, Luvven Cottle
(Reathel Bean), and his wife Wynelle (Betty Wills Stephens), who tell him the
lake can no longer be swum in because a chemical company has been using it as a
site to dump toxic waste — though the slide is still there, sitting forlornly
in the middle of a soup of toxic chemicals. Rev. Cottle also inquires about the
state of Al’s soul and whether he’s been saved, which predictably irritates
him. (Later the not-so-good Reverend is arrested for allegedly killing three people — a husband, wife and their six-year-old child — because they dared leave his church.)
Al also sees a few magical-realist sights, including two visits to diners
in which first a glass of water and then a cup of coffee get poured backwards, flowing into rather than out of their pitchers as they’re being poured, and then he
sees a boy riding a bicycle … also backwards. Then he encounters a long-haired
hippie-type alternately known as Buck and The Kid (Sam Rockwell), who wants
Al’s help with his car — a decrepit 1967 Ford Galaxie convertible whose
distributor has basically disintegrated — and who latches on to him both
literally (he chains his own non-functioning car to Al’s rental so Al can tow
him to a garage) and figuratively. Buck, who dresses in a buckskin jacket and
raccoon coat he stole from the star of a play he was in about Davy Crockett,
invites Al to stay at his home — which is basically an open-air courtyard in
the middle of nowhere with just a few enclosed bits. Buck is a proudly
independent young man who makes his living stealing and reselling bits of tacky
ceramic sculpture used by local homeowners to adorn the fronts of their houses.
He also refuses to pay taxes and aspires to live “totally off the grid,”
generating his own electricity and avoiding being billed by anything for
anybody. Al and Buck end up hanging together for several days, finding a
swimming hole in which they go skinny-dipping (there was a brief full-frontal
of Sam Rockwell and seeing his dick was a treat!) and ultimately take two
sisters, Floatie (Catherine Keener) and Purline (Lisa Blount) Dupre, whom they
meet-cute when they literally bump into each other at the local supermarket and it’s the sort of
hate-at-first-sight meeting that you just know is going to blossom into love, or at least mutual
lust — and Al and Floatie end up getting it on in a sequence that seems
retrograde in itself given the extent of the sexual counterrevolution.
It seems
like years since we’ve been asked to believe in an extramarital coupling as a
sign of personal, emotional and spiritual liberation — in modern-day movies
like Lost in Translation the
geographically isolated male lead is usually depicted as strong in his refusal to have sex with a willing partner because he’s
already got a wife back home — and ultimately Box of Moonlight both stands and falls on its quirks: the tomato
fight in the field Al and Buck get into, their bar confrontation with two of
the locals (one played by a virtually unrecognizable Dermot Mulroney) that
leaves them both badly beaten, the mix tape that’s been left behind by a
previous renter of Al’s car (including the Fireballs’ cover of “The Carioca,”
the first song Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever danced to on screen, and a
searing Elmore James version of “Blues Before Sunrise”) that itself seems to
broaden his horizons, and even the magical-realist bits that don’t seem to add
much to the film plot-wise but bolster its overall strangeness. After pissing
off his family that he won’t be there for the Fourth of July (which he spends
setting off illegal fireworks with Buck while his wife and son back home get
upset over the amount of money they’d spent on hamburgers and chicken for a
Fourth of July barbecue they were counting on him to make), Al finally comes
home, surprising his wife and son by being less upset with his son’s failure to
study the multiplication tables (for which Al ordered him “flash cards” — I
remember flash cards as about 4” x 6” but these are poster-sized!) than they
expected and more open to other people’s priorities. Box of Moonlight — the title refers to a keepsake box Buck gives Al,
saying it contains moonlight which will get away if he ever opens it, but which
really contains the keys to Al’s
rent-a-car, which Buck hid there so Al would stay with him longer — is one of
those films that isn’t great but it is thoroughly charming, and even though it’s rather predictable in terms
of where it’s going it’s still joyful to watch it get there.
