Taglines: Virginity, sex, the big cry, and other salty topics.
Moonlight and Valentino movie storyline. College poetry professor and poet Rebecca Trager Lott’s husband Ben Lott has just died in a freak accident. Rebecca’s support during this difficult time consists of her best friend Sylvie Morrow, her sister Lucy Trager, and her ex-stepmother Alberta Trager. Earth mother Sylvie is dealing with what she sees as the probable end of her own marriage to her husband Paul Morrow.
Chain smoking Lucy is a directionless and insecure woman who is still mourning their mother’s death fourteen years earlier from cancer. And Wall Street executive Alberta, who Lucy in particular doesn’t like in her life (especially as Alberta and their father have since divorced) is a domineering but admittedly efficient woman who treats her personal life as an extension of her professional life. As time progresses and each woman deals with her own issues while trying to help Rebecca, a hunky house painter who they have nicknamed “Valentino” enters their collective lives.
“Valentino” profoundly affects each of their lives, at the same time that Rebecca, the only one who is seen as having had the perfect marriage, provides what they hope is sage advice for their issues. What comes into question is the appropriate time that Rebecca is allowed to feel sorry for herself. She makes an admission about her marriage and about “Valentino” that may provide the answer.
Moonlight and Valentino is a 1995 comedy-drama film directed by David Anspaugh and starring Elizabeth Perkins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Bon Jovi, Kelli Fox, Kathleen Turner, Whoopi Goldberg, Erica Luttrell, Shadia Simmons, Carlton Watson and Josef Sommer. The screenplay by Ellen Simon is based on her semi-autobiographical play of the same title.
Film Review for Moonlight and Valentino
“Moonlight and Valentino,” starring Elizabeth Perkins, Whoopi Goldberg, Kathleen Turner and Gwyneth Paltrow, celebrates group togetherness, dumb male studs as icons, and one-liners from the Erma Bombeck trove. Some will eat this stuff up. Others will run screaming into the night. But no matter how fast they take off, they’ll never catch up with me.
Unfortunately for the film’s potential fans, “Moonlight” skitters somewhere between mildly diverting and lukewarm. There are far more humorous seriocomedies featuring female ensembles to be rented in the video stores, such as “Steel Magnolias” and “Crimes of the Heart.” “Moonlight,” which Ellen Simon adapted from her stage play, is just a feel-good, comically mediocre also-ran.
Characters walk around with uni-purpose adjectives floating over their heads, as their problems unfold with the connect-the-dots morality of an Ann Landers column:
* Perkins, a grieving college professor whose husband was killed by a car while jogging, needs to end her bereavement. Dear Grievin’: Get a new lover.
* Goldberg, a ceramic artist and Perkins’s eccentric best friend, is missing that loving togetherness she once had with husband Peter Coyote. Dear Missing: You and Coyote need to howl together.
* Paltrow, Perkins’s neurotic kid-sister, mopes around in black clothes. Dear Ms. Sprockets: Spoil yourself with a guilt-free roll in the hay.
* Turner, Perkins and Paltrow’s overbearing ex-stepmother, lives a life of meetings, mobile phones and limo rides. She’s constantly trying to gain acceptance from her step-daughters, whose allegiance to their late, blood mother is considerable. Dear Ms. Executive: Accept the love between your step-daughters and their real mother—and put that phone down.
An air of mischievous, stud-muffinfantasy is injected when too-cute-to-be-true Jon Bon Jovi happens to be painting the house next door to Perkins. Goldberg, Paltrow and Turner giddily decide that this man, who basks in the sunshine of permanent good-hair days, will light up Perkins’s gray future.
Mr. Bun Jovi, it turns out, liberates all of them. Suddenly, there are more pairings-off than a Moonie wedding, as our delicious house painter and Perkins, Coyote and Goldberg, Paltrow and a poetry student (Jeremy Sisto), and even Turner and her step-daughters, establish new, loving links.
“Moonlight” is the kind of movie in which everyone takes a turn being terminally adorable. Goldberg, as usual, seems out to steal any scene she’s in with quasi-improvisational cuteness. When Paltrow becomes attracted to her poetry man, she asks Perkins to explain the whole sex-enjoyment thing. While Perkins patiently attempts to describe the physiological magic of good lovemaking, we’re supposed to believe that Paltrow—an attractive, intelligent woman—has all the sexual awareness of an 11-year-old.
“I need your advice about moaning,” Paltrow says later on Perkins’s answering machine.
As for Bon Jovi, Perkins catches him painting the outside of her house one moonlit night. In this movie, that makes him a Valentino. In my neighborhood, he’d be rightfully arrested.
Moonlight and Valentino movie trailer.
Moonlight and Valentino (1995)
Directed by: David Anspaugh
Starring: Elizabeth Perkins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Bon Jovi, Kelli Fox, Kathleen Turner, Whoopi Goldberg, Erica Luttrell, Shadia Simmons, Carlton Watson, Josef Sommer
Screenplay by: Ellen Simon
Production Design by: Robb Wilson King
Cinematography by: Julio Macat
Film Editing by: David Rosenbloom
Costume Design by: Denise Cronenberg
Set Decoration by: Carol Lavoie
Art Direction by: David B. Ferguson
Music by: Howard Shore
MPAA Rating: R for brief strong language.
Distributed by: Gramercy Pictures
Release Date: September 29, 1995
Hits: 208
