A Walk on the Moon

It's 1969. As moon-walking Apollo astronauts take giant steps for mankind, hippies invade Woodstock and students protest against the Vietnam War, Jewish housewife Pearl Kantrowitz (Lane) enjoys her own summer of love at a traditional Catskills holiday resort. While her TV repairman husband Marty (Schreiber) slaves away back in town, and her teenage daughter Alison (Paquin) flirts with adulthood, Pearl wears tie-dye, goes skinny dipping and gets it on with Walker Jerome (Mortensen), a handsome hippie who finances his freewheeling lifestyle by selling blouses. As the frustrated wife, Lane is both sensual and sympathetic, although the scrupulously fair screenplay is clear about the costs of her liberation. Schreiber conveys a stolid dignity as the hardworking husband whose limited worldview is shattered by his wife's infidelity. A modest, lovingly crafted melodrama, but regrettably, this first feature from actor-turned-director Goldwyn (who played Patrick Swayze's duplicitous colleague in Ghost) never integrates its parochial setting and intimate emotional conflicts with the broader social canvas, which in the event feels more like a historical backdrop than a dramatic context.