Thursday, April 17, 2025

Don DiCillo | Box of Moonlight / 1996

finding his very own pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Don DiCillo (screenwriter and director) Box of Moonlight / 1996

 

In the midst of the glorious rolling wildlands, with seemingly pristine forests, lakes, and rivers, is a small Tennessee town with the usual small town look-alike chain-owned dining spots, a sprawling strip club, and new a factory going up on the edge of town, to be powered by a Zeus dynamo electric generator to mass produce window-shield wipers. In the town live also the usual hillbilly mechanics, mean-spirited elderly men and women, and masses of citizens who come running the minute one of their brethren spots a figure in a billboard that looks like Jesus Christ.


    Staying in the nearby Quality Inn motel are the workers building the new factory on the edge of town including their Chicago-based boss, the finicky and basically unfriendly company robot Al Fountain (John Turturro), feared and mocked by his employees, a fact he knows but discovers more fully while standing outside a room one night where his workers are playing poker as they express their feelings that, having just been invited by their foreman, he will not show up. Al would suck up all the joy even out of family July 4th celebration, which in a few days is about to occur, he reminding his young boy with each telephone call that fireworks are illegal, while he demands instead that the kid learn his multiplication tables.

       Even his wife, describes Al as a piece of “clockwork,” a human under the thrall of time; and throughout the film Turturro’s character not only telephones home to his wife Deb (Annie Corley) and his son Bob (Alexander Goodwin) at precisely the same time each evening, but clocks his comments to himself, which have become increasingly more common. Moreover, he has begun to have impossible visions, a strand of gray hair that he has plucked from his dark black mane falls to the floor as if in slow motion. When waitresses pour water or coffee, the liquid flows backwards, out of the cup and back into their pots. A young boy bicycles backwards past the bus the workers take each day to their work site. 

      In another words, Tom DiCillo’s 1996 film Box of Moonlight is, on one level, a fairly conventional story about a man undergoing a mid-life crisis. If at first, Al hasn’t a clue as to what is happening to him, when an executive helicopter flies in to announce that work on the new plant is to immediately cease, he does not, as do the others, gladly take his bonus and hurry off home. Lying to his wife, Al determines to stay on the few days more at the closed-job job than it was to have taken and travels to a lake where he remembers in which that as a child he had a wonderful time swimming out to a large slide in the middle of the water, which sent him flying off its lip like a bird in flight.

      No one remembers the place he calls Splashy Lake, but after a long drive the following day, he does eventually find Splatcee Lake with its old slide crumbling into pieces, the water filled with formaldehyde leaked from a nearby factory. There he encounters a seemingly friendly couple who briefly share in his nostalgia about the days of the original park before attempting to convert him to their born-again religion, Al hurrying off in disgust, even his lame attempt to discover some of the missing joy in his life having also ended in failure. On the news, we later see the same man after he has axed to death of his “followers.”


    But around the very next bend of the road he spins out in terror in his attempt to miss hitting a stalled car owned by an eccentrically dressed young man (Sam Rockwell) who calls himself “the Kid,” costumed as Davy Crockett, trappings he has stolen from a movie set because after trying it on; “it just fit perfect,” as if made for him.

      The Kid, utterly stymied by the car’s breakdown, asks if the electrical engineer might know anything about car engines, and before Al can answer with a weak, “probably,” he finds himself in the driver’s seat of the boy’s broken down Cadillac with the Kid in the front seat of his rental car, the two chained together as they tow the broken-down auto to the young’s man “house.”

      His home, it turns out, is the outer shell of a deteriorating trailer, at the back of which, in the midst of a forest grove, sits a bed defining a kind of bedroom, a couch standing in for a living room, and benches pretending to be dinner tables all lit up with strings of festive lights that  celebrate, as the Kid describes it, “going off the grid.”

    Told that there are no hotels for miles and given the late hour of their final arrival, Al has no choice but to fall into the open-air bed, while the Kid snuggles up exhaustedly in his couch. Like clockwork, Al wakes up to join the Kid in a breakfast of mashed-up Oreo cookies and milk, ready to drive back to his motel and probably back into his routine life—but not before the Kid shanghaies him for a quick trip to the local garage for his car’s new distributor, and, through a series of tricks and deceit, which includes the inexplicable loss of rental car’s keys, holds Al a virtual prisoner for a few days in what Al soon discovers is paradise.




     The two go swimming naked (the Kid at least) at a local water hole, steal tomatoes and eat  them fresh from the vine, play vineyard games that result in the police showing up to arrest what they think are delinquent kids, and after evading the cops, they share a short trip through the nearby forest at the edge of which sits new factory being built which the Kid is certain is government installation to create nerve gas. It happens to be the very windshield wiper factory that Al and his men were building, all this time, he now realizes, having been only a few steps away from the wonderous new world that the boy has shown him. His stay ends with an Independence Day celebration that includes hamburgers, hotdogs, corn-on the cob, a wild display of illegal fireworks, two girls (Catherine Keener and Lisa Blount) the boys have met at the local swimming hole, and before the night is over, they share the absolute pleasure of sex.


     Al discovers in the Kid a gullible boy who loves professional wrestling—which he watches on his found TV screen powered by electricity stolen from a nearby powerline—refusing to believe the truth when Al tells him that it’s just a stage performance in the way that some Southern folk still today refuse to believe the truth about presidents and elections.

        Upon being beaten up by the two local goon mechanics, the Kid breaks down in tears when Al attempts to hold him back from seeking revenge, the boy hugging Al desperately in his momentary defeat like a father he probably has never had.


        And despite all of the Kid’s thievery—which extends to wooden statues of deer and gnomes that people put out on their lawns as objects of beauty which he resells to local buyers to pay for the little food he consumes (Al has purchased all the 4th of July eats and liquor)—the boy has a private moral code that would shame any priest or elected official.

        All of which leads Al to his own deceptive tricks, postponing the delivery of his car keys in order to stay on just a little bit longer before returning to the routine that is at the center of his growing angst.

        As I mention elsewhere in these pages, a straight friend of mine once said with regard to the film On Golden Pond, “All you need to make an older man happy is to put him on a boat with a beautiful boy fresh with the wonder of the world.” If Al and the Kid don’t bother to board a boat, together they have a near-ecstatic adventure sailing through the few days they spend with one another, engaging in a deep kind of hetero love that is close to that shared by Enrico Salvatore "Ratso" Rizzo and another grown up kid in a queer costume, Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy


        These are heterosexual men behaving somewhat like kids in their exploration of each other’s minds and bodies, for of course the only real solution to a midlife crisis is to meet up somehow with Peter Pan, the lost boy who, having never grown up, who can take you to Never-Never Land, a queer world that opens up all your closeted desires. And who doesn’t love Pan?

        Only in this case, alas, Al has been his own Captain Hook followed about by his crocodile clock. But by joining forces with the enemy, Al comes through, realizing that all his visions of time going backwards where in his head, available any time he wanted them, as nearby to life as his factory was to this back-hills paradise. Being spot on the grid and off is only a matter of traveling through a few synapses of the brain.

        When he finally does drive off into the sunset, pausing ruefully to wave goodbye to his Peter Pan, Al returns home with gifts, a little pack of the least dangerous of fireworks for his Bobby, and a box that the Kid has given him upon his leaving, which so the boy insisted captures the moonlight that falls so visibly upon his open-air house. Al suggests Deb might want to use it as a jewelry box.

      When she opens it, of course, the moonlight escapes without her seeing it. But under its purple lining she discovers something very strange, a pair of rental car keys. I wonder who these belonged to, she muses?

     Evidence, once more, that the heterosexual world needs queer reality to learn how to survive, DeCillo's lovely film demonstrates, without threatening sexual identity, how "the other" is necessary to help the majority to enhance and redeem their lives.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

 

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