A touching, sweet-natured coming-of-age story set in a more innocent time, "The Man in the Moon" boasts sensitive direction and superb performances, even when the script occasionally falters.
Despite the star billing of veterans Sam Waterston, Tess Harper and Gail Strickland, the focus is on the youngsters here, primarily Reese Witherspoon as Dani, a 14-year-old girl who wants to grow up faster than nature intends.
It is the early '50s and Dani lives in rural Louisiana with her strict, somewhat aloof father (Water-ston); her loving, very pregnant mother (Harper); her older, popular sister Maureen (Emily Warfield); and her baby sister.
Dani is a tomboy with a chip on her shoulder, frustrated that people still treat her like a child and that she isn't old enough for boys to be attracted to her.
Eventually, when she's at her favorite swimming hole one day, she meets Court (Jason London), the son of a recently widowed neighbor (Strickland). Court is lonely, having left all his city friends to move with Mom back to the farm they abandoned years before. A likable, responsible kid, he strikes up a friendship with Dani, but she wants more. Court is 17, however, so Dani seems more like a kid sister, which only adds to her frustration. He's also too decent to take advantage of her vulnerability.
As is inevitable, however, Court meets Maureen, is obviously attracted to her and the result is guilt and frustration for all three.
Rather than resolve the conflicts of this romantic triangle through character action, first-time screenwriter Jenny Wingfield uses the contrivances of tragedy to pull it all together. Tragedies do happen in real life, of course, but it might have been more interesting to allow the characters to work things out rather than have fate do it for them.
Still, that's a small complaint when balanced against the many small moments of truth in Wing-field's insightful and compelling screenplay. And director Robert Mulligan, who is at his best when his touch is light (as with "To Kill a Mockingbird" back in the '60s), is in rare form here, a nice change from the mediocre fare he's turned out in recent years. (And it's quite possible that's because none of the scripts he's received spoke to him as this one obviously did.)
He pulls terrific performances from the entire cast — especially young Witherspoon, who wonderfully conveys all the wide-eyed innocence, quizzical anger and pain of growing into adolescence. And he focuses a telling eye on the manners and mores of the 1950s.
"The Man in the Moon" is rated PG for some violence, profanity, sex and brief nudity.