Taking Stock at Woodstock By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 2, 1999

Tony Goldwyn makes his directorial debut with "A Walk on the Moon." (Miramax) Director: Tony Goldwyn Cast: Diane Lane; Viggo Mortensen; Liev Schreiber; Anna Paquin; Tovah Feldshuh Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes Some nudity and sexual innuendo

Anyway, whatever it was, 31-year-old Pearl Kantrowitz did it, and not with her husband, Marty, but with a hippy-dippy blouse salesman named Walker, while Marty was back in the Bronx, putting new tubes in Mrs. Goldberg's TV.

But who could blame Pearl? After all, Marty's such a schlumph, he's never there, and that Walker, a prototypical New Man who, hell no, won't go, has a chest like a marble statue, a face as craggy-perfect as any on Rushmore, and a wad of blond hair thick as any lion's. Besides, it's Viggo Mortensen.

The movie is set at a crossroads of Pearl's life and a crossroads in America's. It's the summer of '69, a stretch of time framed by Our Boys playing hopscotch on the moon and Our Kids playing sexual hide-and-go-seek at Woodstock. Pearl is married, has two kids and has settled for a life of quiet, if unspectacular, lower-middle-class normalcy. Up at Dr. Fogler's summer cabins in the Catskills, she smokes, plays mah-jongg and tries not to yell too much at either her kids or her mother-in-law while Marty stays home to resuscitate cooked TVs; meanwhile Pearl notices that all around her, America is . . . well, to this day we still argue over what America was doing in 1969. Infantile tantrum? Greening? Tuning in, turning on and dropping out? Deconstructing the moral pillars of the West?

A lesser actress than Diane Lane could render Pearl's dilemma into sentimentalized pablum and the movie's Catskills Jewishness vs. Woodstock self-indulgence could feel didactic. The movie just gets by, however, on Lane's capacity to express the yearning that Pearl feels as authentically as the guilt she suffers. Lane lets us know that this isn't a Pearl that anyone ever knew existed but it's still a Pearl that Pearl knew existed. Married and pregnant at 17, now in her early thirties, she has the furious but buried anger that she's missing out on something, even if neither she nor anybody else can articulate it.

The movie gets by even better on Marty's titanic response to his wife's infidelity. Liev Schreiber, who usually plays slightly wacky ironists or attitude kings, gives Marty a common man's rage but a decent man's stubborn sense of integrity and commitment. The pain he feels goes straight to his heart and it's immense, like a tremor or a spasm, something uncontrollable and dangerous. But eventually he gets the best of it, and settles down to doing the right thing.

As for Mortensen, he's just Stuff with blue eyes; his performance demanded more time in the gym than the actors' studio.

There's a subplot, a bit obvious but amusing. That is, Pearl's daughter – whose presence pushed Pearl into that very young marriage – is also beginning to feel her own identity. But 13-year-old Alison (Anna Paquin) is much more cautious than Mom and while Mom is bathing nude with her blouse man in a Catskills stream or rolling on the greensward at the world's most famous rock concert, Alison is wondering about first base. However when (oh wondrous coincidence!) she spies her mama topless amid the hippie infantry in that Agincourt of free love that was muddy Woodstock, she's wrecked emotionally and her mother has some serious repair work to do.

Under all this, there's a cultural argument. It's almost a parable. Pearl is America, taken with the pleasures and the freedoms the counterculture offers; Marty is the solid silent majority, working hard, paying taxes, fighting wars, saluting the flag. Yet the film, as directed by actor Tony Goldwyn and written by Pamela Gray as a master's thesis, is far from an endorsement of either side. It refuses to turn the hippie stud into a paragon of anything except his own appetite, though at the same time, it doesn't quite get around to abhorring him either. And good old Marty, he's just good old Marty.

I like that. It's a nice, middle-of-the-road approach, more interested in exploring pain than striking poses. It believes, in the end, in the decency of most people.