Moonlight Mile
Short description
Moonlight Mile follows Joe Nast, a young man whose life is upended when his fiancée, Diana, is killed shortly before their wedding. Rather than withdraw, he stays in the New England town where Diana grew up, living with her parents, Ben and Jojo Floss, who are struggling with the same loss. Ben presses Joe toward a place in his business, while Jojo keeps him close as a reminder of the daughter she buried. Joe's position grows more complicated when he begins to fall for Bertie, a local postal worker who has her own reasons to grieve. The film, set in the early 1970s, traces how the three of them attempt to rebuild their lives.
Brad Silberling directed and wrote the screenplay, working from his own experience; the film sits between City of Angels and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events in a directing career that began with Casper. Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon play the grieving parents, Jake Gyllenhaal takes the central role of Joe, and Ellen Pompeo appears as Bertie. The production had a budget of 21 million dollars and returned roughly 10 million worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds a 6.6 rating from about 15,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.3 from 245 votes, a narrower sample. A critics' rating of 6.7 from 149 reviews places professional assessments close to the general audience response.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, the film was planned to be titled “Baby's in Black,” like the famous song by The Beatles. The royalties to the copyright holders would have been very substantial, so the film was given a title – like that of a lesser-known song by The Rolling Stones.
- After completing work on the film, screenwriter and director Brad Silberling took a copy of the film to Oregon, where he rented a private cinema and showed the film to the parents of actress Rebecca Scheffer (1967-1989, was killed on the doorstep of her own home by a mentally ill fan). They were indirectly involved in the creation of the film as well.
- Four studios rejected the project. Brad Silberling hoped that Steven Spielberg's studio, DreamWorks, would show interest, but they felt it would be too similar to Sam Mendes's drama "American Beauty" (1999), which was in production at the time.
- Silberling himself once experienced a similar story. In 1989, his girlfriend and promising actress Rebecca Scheffer was killed by a fanatical psychopath, and Brad himself was considered a suspect. There is a version that "Moonlight Mile" is based on those distant events.
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