![]() ![]() Never mind asking where he’s been or if he’s seen Ryan Gosling’s footprint next to a crater, she just screams “Get out!” Eventually, she discovers that her father went to Nebraska for work, and now that he’s gotten it, he wants her to move there with him. Without warning, she throws him out of the house. But she adopts the movie’s lunar metaphor, at least until her father suddenly shows up one morning. She’s a bit wary about fully succumbing, like some of the guys, to outright paternal hatred. Mickey has a bit of a romance with Sonya ( Alyssa Elle Steinacker), whose father also went “to the Moon” and whose mother is nowhere to be found. “With the men gone, we became the men,” says 16-year old Mickey on the soundtrack. Once Roman cruelly abandons Mickey and his younger brother, Kolya ( Zackary Arthur) at a gas station (the scene is predictable but still manages to sting), Eva is reduced to drinking, staring at the TV and doing haircuts for the teenaged boys in town, one of whom she makes out with because, with no grown men around, the women in this town start auditioning for “To Catch a Predator”. Eva digs in her heels, however, and not once are we privy to her reasoning. And the story treads dangerously close to the idea that a woman cannot raise a son successfully.įor example, Roman’s argument for uprooting his family makes a lot of sense as the town is dying and there’s no incentive to stay. The camera kind of leers at them, but not enough to be truly salacious. Making matters worse, “Don’t Come Back from the Moon” doesn’t think too highly of its female characters. It would rather lean on male stereotypes involving fighting and virility. But Mickey’s vision is in tune with the filmmakers’ unwillingness to delve inside the complex notions of fatherhood and whether they can be toxic. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to think about is the nude iteration of my Pops. Late in his narration, Mickey tells us he imagines his father butt nekkid in a hot tub with beautiful Moon women. It’s Mickey who repeatedly tells us about Daddies on the Moon, and not once does he make it sound like a place anybody would want to go. Behind the wheel is his son Mickey ( Jeffrey Wahlberg), who occasionally narrates the film with extraneous, unnecessary snippets of information. In the latter scene, cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj executes the only worthwhile evocation of paternal desertion we’ll see by shooting Roman repeatedly disappearing behind the clouds of smoke kicked up by the donuts being made in the dirt by his car. ![]() ![]() Franco’s Roman Smalley is onscreen about five minutes, first arguing with his wife Eva ( Rashida Jones) about how the town has nothing to offer, then teaching the protagonist how to drive his vintage automobile. Based on a book by Dean Bakopoulos, who also co-scripted with Cheung, “Don’t Come Back From the Moon” follows a young man whose father ( James Franco), like so many other dads in the town, has abandoned his family by leaving this dead-end location for good. ![]()
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