****REPOSTED FROM THE LATE LATE SHOW WITH NEW EDITS AND COMMENTS****
Passionately devoid of conflict, angsty in a way that probably inspired Twilight. Moonlight Mile reminded me a little bit of that Family Guy episode where Chris is in the Scouts, and they have that cut scene about WASP families where they're insulting each other and fighting without yelling.
Really, the premise of this could have been interesting. I liked the small town feel here, and having just been through a death in my immediate family, it was interesting to see how grief played itself out, even though it was simulated. Maybe it's a little macabre, but it made me feel better than I reacted the way I did. By the end of the movie, I really enjoyed the characters, particularly Jake Gyllenhall and Susan Sarandon's characters… they felt almost real, as if I'd known them somewhere a long time ago.
With a cast that powered itself with a Hoffman-Sarandon-Gyllenhall triangle this really should have been self-propelled goodness. However, there were a number of story problems that didn't keep this from being a decent movie, but for me, kept it from being a great movie. There wasn't enough conflict anywhere in the story. Even the adaptation to the death of an unseen loved one didn't cause any real problems until secrets start popping up at the end of the film… and by then I was drowning in tedium and didn't really care.
Hitting on the fiancée of your best friend, whose funeral was less than 72 hours prior. That's tacky on a scale I can't really calculate. It also happens here a few times. For shame.
