The term "women's picture" is often used to derogatorily describe melodramas about adultery in which the principal protagonist is the wife. Today 'chick-flicks' have become the new women's pictures in which the heroine rather than the hero is to the fore and rather than commit adultery is doing all she can to establish her relationships.
Of course, women's pictures were finally made respectable by the great Douglas Sirk who used the genre to explore the mores of a specific time and place in American culture, and the best women's pictures, such as Michael Curtiz' "Mildred Pierce" are as much about class, status and politics with a small p as they are about relationships. Though not quite in the Douglas Sirk class Tony Goldwyn's "A Walk on the Moon" is a very superior example of the genre, dealing as it does with issues in a wider social and historical context than a mere perfunctory summer romance.
For a start, the film is set in the past (1969, to be exact; the title referring to Niel Armstrong's moon walk and is set, literally, just down the road from Woodstock). And it's pleasures are very much in the detail, not just in the summing up of the seismic changes happening in American society at the time but in the smaller day-to-day things that affect the nuclear family at the centre.
Here it benefits considerably from a quartet of superb performances from Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber as the couple whose marriage (in haste and with regrets on both sides) could so easily end on the rocks, from Anna Paquin as their daughter in the throes of growing up and from Tovah Feldshuh as the Jewish mother-in-law with a gift for observation bordering on second sight. Tony Goldwyn handles the interchanges between these people beautifully so that when the wife finally abandons common-sense as well as her clothes for some steamy business with 'the blouse man' underneath a convenient waterfall, the film transcends cliche and becomes both genuinely erotic and moving.
Of course, women's pictures were finally made respectable by the great Douglas Sirk who used the genre to explore the mores of a specific time and place in American culture, and the best women's pictures, such as Michael Curtiz' "Mildred Pierce" are as much about class, status and politics with a small p as they are about relationships. Though not quite in the Douglas Sirk class Tony Goldwyn's "A Walk on the Moon" is a very superior example of the genre, dealing as it does with issues in a wider social and historical context than a mere perfunctory summer romance.
For a start, the film is set in the past (1969, to be exact; the title referring to Niel Armstrong's moon walk and is set, literally, just down the road from Woodstock). And it's pleasures are very much in the detail, not just in the summing up of the seismic changes happening in American society at the time but in the smaller day-to-day things that affect the nuclear family at the centre.
Here it benefits considerably from a quartet of superb performances from Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber as the couple whose marriage (in haste and with regrets on both sides) could so easily end on the rocks, from Anna Paquin as their daughter in the throes of growing up and from Tovah Feldshuh as the Jewish mother-in-law with a gift for observation bordering on second sight. Tony Goldwyn handles the interchanges between these people beautifully so that when the wife finally abandons common-sense as well as her clothes for some steamy business with 'the blouse man' underneath a convenient waterfall, the film transcends cliche and becomes both genuinely erotic and moving.