“Just wait'll those Japs see me and my eagle come chargin' over the hill!”

September 10^th, 2012

Racing with the Moon, (1984)

Nicolas Cage is Nicky

All this talk of nostalgia is a perfect segway into Racing with the Moon, another film that looks to the past to explore how youth slips away. It's the story of two young men killing time during the Christmas of 1943 awaiting induction into the US marines. The debut film of writer Steve Kloves - who would go on to write Wonder Boys and all but one of the Harry Potter movies – Moon has such a lived-in specificity of place and time that I was surprised to learn that Kloves was born in 1960. Maybe some of that credit goes to director Richard Benjamin who was born in 1938 and would go on to direct The Money Pit and, um, My Stepmother is an Alien.

Anyway, Racing with the Moon kicked up my own memories of times gone by - namely, Fast Times and The Best of Times. Which is an irritating way of saying that it stars Sean Penn and features Crispin Glover as an asshole rich kid that Nic Cage clocks in a bowling alley before wiping the blood of Glover's girlfriend's blouse. It's kinda pretty awesome. 

Penn is the gawky audience surrogate and Cage is his harder-livin' friend which means we're treated to an amazing scene where he drunkenly attempts to describe a Tyrone Power war picture and to berate an elderly tattoo artist into printing a bald eagle on his chest: “I'm talkin' about the high-flyin', red-white-'n'-blue Bird of Freedom here!” He also demonstrates a bizarre, flopping chicken dance to Penn while drunk only to break it out again at the crescendo of a rousing rendition of “Tangerine” sung into a mop handle.

It's a little window into Cage's ragin' future and a reminder of how powerful and fun his wild id can be when it's in service of a film that knows how to use it. But, like I said, Moon is about Penn not Cage. Penn is fantastic as a boy staring down his oncoming manhood, as is Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Penn's girlfriend here with a charming mixture of whole-faced innocence and the kind of composure she would later bring to the BBC's Downton Abbey. 

 

The other memories Racing with the Moon kicked up were for the moving but sort of forgettable middle-brow drama fare that seemed to always be on some screen throughout the '80s and '90s. It's filled with the kinds of scenes you don't see in the age of post-irony: Penn teaching McGovern “Heart and Soul” on a piano before they almost kiss; Penn and Cage running with a train as the music swells; Penn and Cage putting on the Andrews Sisters' “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy” during a training exercise for war nurses and watching a jitterbug break out. For every Remains of the Day or The English Patient there were ten or fifteen Moons made for families to take home and then gush about during some subsequent holiday, fruitlessly pressuring relatives to see them. Values are burnished, beliefs are reaffirmed and the audience that sits through the credits at the beginning is guaranteed to be the same audience sitting there at the end. 

Backhanded as that complement is, I don't want to diminish the genuine beauty of Racing with the Moon, especially in its evocation of time and place. Benjamin builds on the world of 1940's small town California in every scene and the set design and prop work feels emotionally charged with more wattage than the charming but serviceable story it's backing. If Rumble Fish is a MTV-addled fever dream of the 1950s, Moon is a Hallmark card to the 1940s. Maybe I'll tell my relatives about it this Thanksgiving.