All the Way Back

On a crisp morning, a middle-aged couple and a young man who appears to be their son are on their way out of the house. Dressed in smart dark clothes, they walk up to a boat of a car--it is the early ‘70s in a provincial East Coast town--and glide to their destination to Sly & the Family Stone’s funky hymn “I Want to Take You Higher.” The universe pulsates around them, warm and vibrant like a sea of anemones.

Kids ride their bicycles. A young couple cuddles in each other’s arms. An old man savors the ritual moment of his morning coffee. The sun glows through a lush canopy of trees. The sky is almost unbearably bright. It is the dance of life, but the passengers in the car observe it listlessly. They are going to a funeral. The couple are burying an only daughter; the young man with them is her fiance.

This series of tableaux from the opening of “Moonlight Mile”--a new picture starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan Sarandon and Jake Gyllenhaal--is emblematic of the bittersweet tenor and unorthodox themes of the film, itself the culmination of an artistic and personal crucible for filmmaker Brad Silberling. “I knew I wanted the family on the journey from their home to the funeral to have to bear witness to the full swirl of life: It just churns on, it doesn’t stop for you,” he says of the unusual overture to what he calls his “emotionally autobiographic” film.

“Moonlight Mile” sprouted from a bitter kernel of personal history--the 1989 murder of Silberling’s girlfriend, actress Rebecca Schaeffer. But the end result, a picture that details with unfettered specificity the process of loss and grieving, suggests that even the darkest of tragedies can yield remarkable gifts.

The film is named after a vintage Rolling Stones love ditty tucked on the group’s “Sticky Fingers” album, and shares with the song a tone that is both weary and hopeful. It tells the journey of Gyllenhaal’s protagonist who, after the funeral, finds himself stunned into paralysis by the loss and completely bewildered about his future. Drawn into a close relationship with the parents of his fiancee, he fumbles toward emotional clarity--and maturity--with them by his side.

It may seem unlikely, yet it all happened more than a decade ago to Silberling, 39, who wrote and directed the movie. In his treatment of a delicate topic, the filmmaker displays a boldness and directness that can only be grounded in firsthand experiences. His story seeks to reveal the sense of utter befuddlement people experience after a great loss. His characters, most remarkably the couple embodied by Sarandon and Hoffman, exist in a perilous space filled with messy, ragged emotions and unexpected complications. They behave awkwardly; they say contradictory things; they use malicious wit and outbursts of laughter as coping mechanisms.

Opening in limited release on Friday, the film lands on screens in the context of a nation freshly stirred by the anniversary of Sept. 11, and seems poised to achieve a larger resonance at a time when the random loss of a loved one is a concept vigorously alive in the collective consciousness. But in all likelihood, audiences will either empathize with the sorrows of the protagonists or be turned off by them.

After all, profound grief is deeply isolating, and in many ways those not immersed in it can’t relate.

“When you lose someone, I think there is an expectation that the whole world would stop,” explains Gyllenhaal, the 21-year-old actor who plays Silberling’s fictional alter ego, Joe Nast, with wonderful aplomb.

In fact, the rhythms of life continue on unaltered, and it is only the bereaved who are suddenly off-key; to them the universe appears slightly askew. With “Moonlight Mile,” says Gyllenhaal, “someone who’s experienced that has put it on screen.”

The film has been more than a decade in the making, although it began as a family tragedy, not a career project. In 1989, Silberling, who grew up in Los Angeles, was just out of film school and had embarked on a promising career directing television dramas. Schaeffer, his girlfriend at the time, was the star of the TV sitcom “My Sister Sam.” In July of that year, she was followed to her Los Angeles home by a deranged fan who had obtained her address from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He shot her to death.

Silberling, then in his mid-20s, says he was stunned by the loss. Equally perplexed were his girlfriend’s parents, a couple in their 40s who had lost their only daughter. The two parties hardly knew each other but soon grew unexpectedly close. “We had a relationship that went from zero to 60 on the speedometer,” the filmmaker recalls.

He recognized in the parents the woman he lost. “They were like my girlfriend in stereo--all the personality and the wit, all was there.” But what he initially thought would be a continuing relationship with her turned into a close-knit bond with her family.

The trio clung together in a strange new formation--just as the fictional Floss clan from “Moonlight Mile” embrace Joe in their midst and grow ever more reluctant to let him go. He continues to sleep in the young woman’s bedroom for weeks after the funeral.

He becomes part of the family, is even drawn into a business partnership with the man who would have been his father-in-law.

On screen as in real life, what strengthened the bond was the fact that to the community, they were all suddenly typecast--they became, collectively, the bereaved. With that, “there’s this new set of weird expectations put upon you,” Silberling says. The masks of bereavement--piety, sadness, resignation--are to be worn at all times in public. It is no wonder that the family thrust in this position cannot wait to slip out of view.

In the film, the Flosses slam the door shut behind their visitors in relief, only to gossip ferociously about everyone afterward.

“That’s what it’s like--it’s crazy,” Silberling says. He did not move in with his girlfriend’s family but spent a significant amount of time with them, and remembers that despite the shared company, there was little solace for anyone involved.

To keep occupied--”in the wake of a loss, you do anything you can to stay busy”--he threw himself into lobbying efforts. He argued in front of the state legislature for a privacy law to thwart stalking of public figures. (The statute was passed in California first, and later became the basis for the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which Congress passed in 1994.)

The killer’s trial came and went, and although it resulted in a life sentence without possibility of parole--Marcia Clark was the prosecutor--it also failed to provide the much-sought emotional relief.

“The moment I heard the judgment, it was a kick in the stomach,” Silberling remembers. “We’d been waiting for the clouds to part. We thought we’d feel great and skip out to lunch--and it was just the opposite. I discovered that it’s a fantasy that you will get any closure from it--there really is none.”

It was around that time that the filmmaker began considering channeling his experience into a film project. He completed a screenplay in 1993. Rather than excruciating, the script was “hugely pleasurable to write,” Silberling says now. “I knew the story that I was telling was heading toward something unbelievably beautiful and positive.” The script slept in drawers for a long time, as studio heads balked at its complex emotional underpinnings. Completing it however, marked a new chapter in Silberling’s life. He met someone--actress Amy Brenneman--with whom he felt he could fall in love again. She later became his wife.

His professional career took off. On the strength of an episode of the TV show “Brooklyn Bridge” Silberling directed, Steven Spielberg tapped him to make “Casper,” the big-screen rendition of a popular comic book and TV series about a teenage ghost. He next found himself in the position to direct “City of Angels,” a Hollywood retelling of Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire.” The film was a parable woven around the conceit that angels observe with muted wonder--and envy--the ability of humans to weep, make love or savor a cup of coffee.

Silberling says that he unconsciously gravitates toward stories that involve the possibility of another dimension: “I love a chance to really examine the wonderful minutiae of life. And sometimes you almost have to have an out-of-body experience to look back at your body.

“Stories that allow you to hop out of a daily routine to then refocus on the small details of our daily routines--these are those stories I love to tell. I wish I had the wisdom to say that it’s always conscious,” says the filmmaker, whose production company is called Reveal Entertainment.

As he watched his first two movies rake in almost half a billion dollars at the box office, Silberling knew the time was ripe for him to tackle his personal project. “At the time I thought, ‘If I had earned the right to anything, I had earned the right to put my purest sensibility up on the screen.’ ” In 1998, he completed a new draft of the screenplay, and set on a path that lasted almost three years and took him to three studios.

Everywhere he went, an initial flurry of excitement about the screenplay would inevitably be tempered by fears that the project would be a marketing nightmare. The OK finally came in the fall of 2000 from Disney and shooting for the film was underway by the following spring.

As Silberling’s long-cherished project has come to fruition, the hurt and loss may have been forged into art. Alas, there was still no moment of catharsis along the way. To this day, detailing the steps of the journey that enabled him to translate raw life experience into film gives him the odd pang of emotion, makes his eyes grow blurry with tears for a moment or two.

In “Moonlight Mile,” the narrative brushes up against the edges of a raw emotional zone in which people find themselves after experiencing a devastating blow. It is a mined territory where attempts to tactfully dance around the tragedy infuriate just as much as sincere condolences.

In the same breath, Sarandon’s JoJo Floss bristles at acquaintances who offer kind words about her daughter and complains about those who don’t: “It pisses me off when they ask about her, and it pisses me off when they don’t ask about her!” There is the laughter behind closed doors when the unlikely trio of parents and fiance mock the pious reverence of departed guests, and rant in exasperation about the “dripping looks of sympathy” affected by them.

Because the emotional underpinnings of the film are autobiographical, Silberling says he felt confident to put on screen behavior that may appear shocking to audiences. “You can’t imagine that others would grieve this way--yeah, they do,” he insists. “People are out of their minds sometimes. But in the wake of the loss, the rule book goes out the window.”

His real experiences surrounding the death of his girlfriend included not only heartbreak, but also some absurdly humorous episodes. Some are on the screen: The fiancee’s girlfriends divvy up her duds like a flock of vultures feasting on fresh prey. Much to his disbelief, Joe is hurriedly set up on a date with another woman. (“That happened to me two months after my girlfriend was killed, and I couldn’t believe it,” Silberling says.) JoJo Floss tosses gift books with titles like “Grieving for Grown-ups” and “The Sweeter Solace” into the fireplace with enormous relish--a kind of wish fulfillment for the director. He dreamed about doing the same thing in real life when everybody from friends to the family rabbi was handing him similar self-help manuals on how to will grief away. “I began to have a loathing of the simplicity of it--as if [these books listed] the ingredients for some sort of lovely bromide to get over the flu.

“The fast food mentality creeps into our emotional lives, where we are not willing to just sit for very long with our feelings, especially uncomfortable ones,” he says.

Just like the fictional Floss tribe, Silberling says he and Schaeffer’s parents fought to preserve a complete memory of the person they lost, warts and all. Perhaps the film’s most laudable effort is its insistence on piecing together an all-inclusive emotional landscape in the wake of a loss.

Recalls Gyllenhaal: “The hardest thing was keeping the humor alive in a situation where people would think there was no irony.” The young actor says that his own instinct was to veer toward portraying sadness on screen. “But Brad would steer me back toward the reality and say, ‘Trust me. This was a funny moment, and awkward and embarrassing.’ ”

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Sorina Diaconescu is a regular contributor to Calendar.