Lost in schmaltzy limbo

Somewhere within the sweet syrup that gives taste and texture to this comedy of bereavement, is a sharp, tart little film about the difficulties of letting go the memory of the dear deceased - in this case, a daughter murdered on the eve of her wedding. But Brad Silberling, who wrote, produced and directed it, can't bear to let his precious film out of his grasp. It has a proprietorial feel, based as it is on a similar loss in Silberling's own early life. It's over-wordy and overly respectful to the film-maker's own text and, possibly, memories.

The title comes from a Rolling Stones lyric: "I am just living to be lying by your side/But I'm just about a moonlight mile away." Says Silberling: "It's the distance between where you are and where your heart wants to be." That tells us what we're in for.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the dead girl's fiancé, who now finds himself taken emotional hostage by his prospective in-laws, despite the wedding having never happened. Their need for him as a token son-in-law consummates it.

Susan Sarandon is the mother, battling on, but in need of catharsis. Dustin Hoffman, in the sort of too youthful haircut that middle-ageing men in the property business affected in the 1970s, the period of the story, is the father who can't let go of his daughter's memory.

Gyllenhaal is torn between duty to them and desires of his own: unable to make his emotional escape from this surrogate family who give him board, yet pulled romantically to a liberated young townswoman (Ellen Pompeo) who offers him bed. It's certainly a sitcom with an intriguing idea - which is one up on most of its formulaic kind.

Gyllenhaal, who's recently been an out-and-out oddball in Donnie Darko and a disturbed adolescent in The Good Girl, here plays cute and conflicted. Fine as far as it goes, though it doesn't go far: after a time, you find you're studying his mascara, yearning to muss his mop of hair, and wondering if he's discovered Botox yet.

It's Hoffman who has most fun as the control-freak dad whose obsession with neatness and order makes him go round the living-room the minute the guests have departed, plumping the cushions and looking for fingerprints on the china. The details of small-town life and citizenry produce some of the sharpest-written scenes, particularly a gem of a business lunch at which a local property magnate struggles to talk the language of youth.

The beginning takes one right back to The Graduate, when Hoffman was 30 but playing a twentysomething trying to figure out his future while his father's associates solemnly recommended "Plastics". Here, the civic wiseacres take Gyllenhaal aside and tip, "Commercial real estate". It's a sly homage to an earlier era, and the earlier star.

If only Brad Silberling had hardened his focus, cut dialogue that runs selfindulgently on and on, and gone for a more realistic ending instead of a shamelessly sentimentalised courtroom-reconciliation with the memory-of the deceased, Moonlight Mile might have achieved a lot of the wry retrospection of About Schmidt. Too often, it sounds as if it's about schmaltz.

Moonlight Mile
Cert: cert15