Sunday, November 29, 2020 - Box of Moonlight (1996).

There’s something freewheeling and irresistible going on in Tom DiCillo’s Box of Moonlight (1996), which is felt from the film’s first beat. The opening credits fill the screen over aerial footage of a countryside made up of vast expanses of green fields, blue lakes and clear skies. Yet it’s not just the landscape. It’s the feeling of flying that the aerial footage creates –––– a feeling that carries throughout the entire film. Later, once the closing credits roll, we learn that these shots were taken in and around Knoxville, Tennessee.

John Turturro plays Al Fountain, an electrical engineer who keeps seeing coffee and water being poured into mugs and cups at the same time as the coffee and water begins to disappear again. Also, he sees a young boy riding a bicycle and pedaling forward, yet the bicycle, as well as the boy, keep moving in reverse.

Fountain is stationed at a job away from his home in the suburbs of Chicago, and at a plant where he and his crew have been tasked with the good work of making windshield wipers en masse. The job gets called off, and Fountain and his crew are sent home early. However, they do still get their bonuses, and when viewed from afar, all is well in Fountain’s life. His wife, Deb (Annie Corley) and his young son, Bob (Alexander Goodwin), are waiting for him at home, and wondering whether he’ll make it back for the Fourth of July. Fountain doesn’t tell them that he could make it in time if he wanted to; instead, he rents a car –––– and starts driving. Not long thereafter, he meets Kid, “Or Buddy, or Buck, or the Kid. Or heck, you can just call me whatever,” (Sam Rockwell), as Kid’s 67 Ford Galaxie 500 is stalled alongside the road.

There’s a way to tell this story and shoot this film in a fashion that’s riddled with cliches and deprived of any and all originality. Fountain could just be a middling man wallowing in the shallows of middle-age while living in the suburbs of middle-America; and Kid could just serve as a caricature ––––– a reflection of Fountain’s polar opposite. Yet Box of Moonlight, with skill and with heart, weaves around these traps. Rockwell’s Kid is just too likable, “I’m off the grid!” he keeps repeating; and Turturro plays Fountain with such a compelling and beautiful balance between honest restraint and long-overdue abandon, that it’s impossible not to relate.