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.
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.
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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