‘Moonlight’ Grieves and Loves, Hollywood-Style

Calculation and sincerity struggle for the soul of “Moonlight Mile,” always an unequal combat when Hollywood is the battleground. What’s on screen is too honest and from the heart to totally dismiss but too slick and contrived to completely embrace. This is a film that cares about genuine emotion but also wants to tame it, to tidy it up and keep it confined to quarters.

Set in the fictional town of Cape Anne, Mass., in 1973, “Moonlight Mile” focuses on the effects of an event we never see: the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time murder of a young woman named Diana Floss, a bystander killed when a deranged man turns a gun on his wife.

Left to sort through the emotional wreckage are Diana’s stunned fiance, Joe Nast (Jake Gyllenhaal), and her equally distraught parents, commercial real estate agent Ben Floss (Dustin Hoffman) and his writer wife, JoJo (Susan Sarandon).

How they deal with this unexpected catastrophe, the choices they have to make about direction for the rest of their lives, is the territory writer-director Brad Silberling wants to explore.

Silberling, as has been widely reported, has such an event in his own past: His girlfriend, actress Rebecca Schaeffer, was murdered by a stalker in 1989. But even without knowing those specifics, it’s possible to feel a reality behind many of the film’s themes, notions like how critical tart gallows humor is to survival.

Silberling has dedicated the film to “all our loves, departed or yet to arrive” and has called what he’s done “the literalization of emotions” that he and Schaeffer’s parents felt, a summation that sounds about right.

But Silberling also previously directed the Meg Ryan-Nicolas Cage “City of Angels” as well as “Casper,” audience-friendly films that grossed a total of $500 million. He can dive deeply into love and death, but his practiced style also means he is just the kind of smooth operator the studio system is looking for.

Joe Nast and the Flosses (a truly dreadful name) are introduced on the morning of Diana’s funeral. Joe has been staying with his future in-laws for some weeks, preparing for a wedding that is now not to be and a trip to Italy that will never take place. His life has been thrown for a terrible loop, and he is increasingly desperate to figure out just what he should be doing with his future.

Gyllenhaal, a young actor who’s been notable in small films like “October Sky,” “Donnie Darko” and “Lovely & Amazing,” plays Joe. Despite his high-powered co-stars, his is the role that has to carry the picture, and this gifted, accessible actor is fully up to the task. With a sly smile and a natural vulnerability, Gyllenhaal easily handles the sadness, the anger and the sense of humor needed to make his character’s plight individual and not generic.

As for Joe’s once-but-not-future in-laws, the results are more mixed. While Sarandon’s JoJo is one of the film’s most refreshing characters, Hoffman’s Ben is considerably less so.

Forthright, honest to a fault, willing to say just about anything, JoJo is a bracing character, one who really feels created from the inside.

Her brisk “Let’s dish” at the close of the long and trying funeral day, her insistence on literally tossing well-meaning books like “Grieving for Grown-ups” and “These Things Happen” into the fire, all point to a woman unwilling to forgo either anger or biting humor in her self-defense. Despite how often we’ve seen her, Sarandon still manages to bring a sassy and unexpected quality to her strong portrayal.

The difficulty with Hoffman’s Ben, on the other hand, goes beyond the fact that he is the more pliant partner, an accommodating “funerals are awkward at best” kind of guy. Although the actor has tried hard to connect to the role, he hasn’t found the character and can’t get past a kind of “Death of a Salesman Lite” rendition.

Just as much a problem is that the plot strand involving Ben, which has young Joe joining the older man in his real estate business as previously planned, feels extraneous. More successful, at least in part because Holly Hunter is quite effective as an assistant district attorney, is the strand that deals with the legal fate of the man who killed Diana.

“Moonlight Mile” has yet another strand and, like the rest of the film, it is both charming and frustrating. Headed to the local post office to reclaim wedding invitations before they’re mailed, Joe makes the spirited acquaintance of postmistress-bartender Bertie Knox.

As played by Ellen Pompeo in a terrific major studio debut (Steven Spielberg’s upcoming “Catch Me if You Can” is on her agenda), Bertie has presence, moxie and a great sense of humor to go with her good looks. True, she turns out to have issues of her own, but you don’t have to be Carnac the Magnificent to divine that that postal cute-meet is not the end of things between these two.

How you feel about the direction of the Joe-Bertie relationship in particular and the entire “Moonlight Mile” scenario in general depends on your feelings about the Hollywoodization of emotion. The reported nine years it’s taken to get this film set up at a major studio says more about the timidity of Hollywood than the nerviness of what’s been attempted. Silberling has crafted a good number of strong, memorable moments--a barroom dance set to the Rolling Stones title song is particularly nice--but finally the presence of real feelings underlines what’s missing when they’re not there.

MPAA rating: PG-13, for some sensuality and brief strong language. Times guidelines: mature subject matter.

‘Moonlight Mile’

Jake Gyllenhaal...Joe Nast

Dustin Hoffman...Ben Floss

Susan Sarandon...JoJo Floss

Holly Hunter...Mona Camp

Ellen Pompeo...Bertie Knox

Touchstone Pictures and Hyde Park Entertainment present a Reveal Entertainment/Gran Via/Punch production, released by Touchstone Pictures. Director Brad Silberling. Producers Mark Johnson, Brad Silberling. Executive producers Patrick Whitcher, Susan Sarandon, Ashok Amritraj, David Hoberman. Screenplay Brad Silberling. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. Editor Lisa Zeno Churgin. Costumes Mary Zophres. Music Mark Isham. Production design Missy Stewart. Art director Mark Worthington. Set decorator Gina B. Cranham. Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes.

In limited release