MOVIE REVIEW : A Luminescent Tale of Teen Romance

From its opening moments, while the camera slowly pans down from the moon to two teen-age sisters on their porch, idly listening to Elvis’ “Loving You,” “The Man in the Moon” (opening Friday at the AMC Century 14) magically eases us into another world. It’s rural Louisiana in the late ‘50s, repressed, rustic, but also full of youth and awakening sexuality. Everything here seems more heightened, sensual, more intensely observed.

“The Man in the Moon,” a gently scary ballad of a movie, is about how love can open your eyes and then blind them with tears. Perhaps that sounds overly sentimental. But this deeply moving film, directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Mark Rydell, from a script by first-time scenarist Jenny Wingfield, never strays into bathos.

Eerily sophisticated, never condescending, it stays tightly on those two sisters, 14-year-old Dani and 17-year-old Maureen Trant, and on their story: their poignant involvement with 17-year-old Court, the boy next door, whom they barely know but who becomes the focus of their lives.

The material is simple, anecdotal--the kind that people tell us, or their analysts, when they want to exorcise their most harrowing formative experience. Dani (wonderfully played by Reese Witherspoon) adores her popular older sister. And when Court, her special friend and swimming companion, falls for Maureen, as all the boys do, she feels shattered, betrayed.

Dani, whom Witherspoon gives the outward spunk and inner sensitivity of Jodie Foster as a child, has the sublime self-centeredness of youth. She magnifies everyone and everything. But here, at times, the universe really does seem to be throbbing and convulsing in tune with her emotions. Family catastrophes erupt, the skies open up, tragedy looms offstage.

The story unwinds with the inevitability, rigor, clarity and mysterious suggestiveness of a confession. Which, in a way, it is. Wingfield based her script on real-life incidents from her own childhood, events that took place very close to “Moon’s” actual Natchitoches, La., locations.

The cast blends effortlessly and seamlessly: Sam Waterston, Tess Harper and Gail Strickland--whose role is a triumph of evocative compression--and the trio of youthful newcomers (Witherspoon, Emily Warfield and Jason London). Mulligan lavishes his gifts of nightmare lyricism and simpatico with children and adolescents on it all.

Sixty-six-year-old Mulligan, like many film directors of his generation, has tended to work less recently. Perhaps he has been starved for material. But it’s obvious that Wingfield’s heartfelt memoir brings out his best instincts. This isn’t a script as good as the ones Horton Foote used to write for Mulligan and Alan Pakula, or as good as Calder Willingham’s for that other recent Southern memoir, “Rambling Rose.” It doesn’t have the same easy mastery of colloquial dialogue and deft, offbeat characterization. But it does have the same sense of pressing inner necessity, of being a story its writer had to tell.

Mulligan seizes on those qualities of obsessiveness and tenderness and, as in “Summer of ‘42” or “The Other,” turns the movie into a restless, nervous, omen-clouded quest. The camera keeps moving, incessantly prowling the rooms and landscapes with, and sometimes without, Dani. It races with her through the fields and forests, wanders through the rooms, hovers by the sun-dappled lake and then, as if moonstruck, suddenly stops, fixated on its objects of desire or anxiety.

Mulligan’s main visual collaborators here are Freddie Francis--a master cinematographer who also directs horror movies--and the late production designer Gene Callahan, who designed some of Elia Kazan’s best films, including “Splendor in the Grass.” That team, Francis and Callahan, suggest the curious mix of horrific undercurrents and psychological realism that suffuses “Man in the Moon” (rated PG-13, probably for language and brief sexuality).

The movie, luminous and emotionally naked, doesn’t try to justify its subject matter--it simply plunges in. And, as it breaks the sunny surface of nostalgia and remembrance, it easily hits the darker currents below.

‘The Man in the Moon’

Sam Waterston: Matthew Trant

Tess Harper: Abigail Trant

Gail Strickland: Marie Foster

Reese Witherspoon: Dani Trant

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Mark Rydell production. Director Robert Mulligan. Producer Mark Rydell. Executive producers William S. Gilmore, Shari Rhodes. Screenplay Jenny Wingfield. Cinematographer Freddie Francis. Editor Trudy Ship. Costumes Peter & Dawni Saldutti. Music James Newton Howard. Production design Gene Callahan. Art director Fredda Slavin. Set decorator Daril Adler. With Jason London, Emily Warfield. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (language, brief sexuality).