Shoot the Moon (1982): A Review

Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon is a movie about a marriage coming apart, but it gives us surprisingly little understanding of how that marriage got to where we find it. George Dunlap (Albert Finney), a successful writer, and his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) are separating after years of marriage and four daughters. George has become involved with Sandy (Karen Allen), while Faith begins a relationship with Frank (Peter Weller). From there, what might have been an ordinary story of adultery and divorce becomes something much darker: a portrait of a family in which the boundaries between husband and wife, parents and children, love and rage have almost completely disappeared.

Watching it again more than forty years after its release, I found Shoot the Moon both more psychologically interesting and considerably more overwrought than I remembered. It is often powerful, sometimes devastating, but also manipulative—a film determined to give its audience a high-powered emotional experience and sometimes willing to sacrifice psychological breathing room to achieve it.

How Did These People Get Here?

One of the film’s fundamental problems is that George and Faith are already in full emotional combat when we meet them. We know the marriage is collapsing, but we don’t know enough about what it was like when it worked.

That matters. In Two for the Road, another Albert Finney film about a troubled marriage, we understand why the couple fell in love. They are flawed, sometimes selfish and occasionally cruel, but also funny, sexy and likable. Their history gives their deterioration poignancy.

Shoot the Moon doesn’t give George and Faith that foundation. We enter after the emotional capital has largely been spent.

Curiously, the first time we see George, he is tearful. We have little idea why. It is an intriguing introduction because sadness, rather than anger, is our first glimpse of him. But the film does surprisingly little with that sadness. It quickly transmutes into resentment, jealousy and rage. Had Parker occasionally allowed us to see that original grief beneath George’s anger, his eventual deterioration might have been even more tragic.

Keaton is excellent, but at times Faith feels like Annie Hall dropped into a collapsing marriage—the familiar Keaton mannerisms, nervous energy and emotional spontaneity are all there, except the circumstances have become profoundly unfunny. Faith can be charming one moment and bewilderingly contradictory the next.

Her mixed messages to George are extraordinary. The marriage is supposedly over, yet the emotional attachment clearly isn’t. Most strikingly, after they have separated, Faith sleeps with George and then continues moving toward a relationship with Frank. George is simultaneously being told go away and come back.

That doesn’t excuse George’s behavior, but it certainly helps explain the emotional chaos.

Finney Looks as Battered as George Feels

Finney was only in his mid-forties when Shoot the Moon was made, but he looks considerably older. He is puffy, heavy around the eyes and physically rough. In some scenes—particularly at the hospital—he looks almost ravaged.

Whatever the reasons for Finney’s appearance, it works for George. His physical condition becomes part of the characterization. This is a man who appears to be consuming himself from within.

The contrast with Peter Weller is striking. Weller was a remarkably handsome man at this point, helped considerably by the longer hair that softened his angular features. Frank is lean, attractive and comparatively composed—the visual opposite of the battered George.

Frank also seems, initially, like the one adult who might have enough sense to get out of there, but he doesn’t.

And Then There Is Karen Allen

Karen Allen is luminous as Sandy, George’s younger girlfriend. Fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark, she has the natural, unaffected beauty that distinguished her from many more carefully manufactured screen presences of the period.

But Sandy seems to understand something George apparently doesn’t: this is a fling.

George appears surprised to discover that she doesn’t necessarily imagine their relationship as the beginning of some grand new life together. Sandy’s relative emotional independence exposes another of George’s problems. He has destroyed one relationship without actually establishing another.

There is also a wonderfully period-specific scene in which George’s daughters interrogate Sandy about whether she is having sex with their father—and Sandy answers them.

Today the obvious response would seem to be: That is an adult matter and not something I am going to discuss with you.

But this is 1982 California, where disclosure can sometimes seem to substitute for boundaries.

Adults Acting Like Children, Children Acting Like Adults

That lack of boundaries eventually becomes the organizing psychology of the entire film.

The eldest daughter, Sherry, initially comes across as a particularly mouthy adolescent. Gradually, however, something more troubling becomes apparent. The adults have placed her in the role of an adult while they increasingly behave like children.

Sherry knows far too much about her parents’ sexual and emotional lives. She questions the adults about them. The adults answer her. She becomes confidante, interrogator, combatant and judge in a marriage in which she should simply have been allowed to remain a daughter.

Even the physical boundaries barely exist. In one remarkable little moment, Sherry simply walks into her parents’ bedroom without knocking to announce that her sister is sick. Nobody seems particularly surprised. It is a small detail, but by then it seems emblematic of the entire household.

There are no doors in this family, psychologically or sometimes literally.

When the Film Stops Shouting

Parker’s direction can be painfully excessive.

The restaurant confrontation is over the top. At another point, putting the Rolling Stones’ Play with Fire on the stereo virtually clobbers the viewer with the metaphor. We understand that these people are playing with fire. The movie doesn’t need Mick Jagger to explain it.

Again and again, Parker seems reluctant to trust material that is already powerful. Another confrontation, another humiliation, another emotional crescendo arrives to make certain we’ve understood.

Yet the film’s most horrifying sequence demonstrates how powerful Shoot the Moon can be when Parker lets the situation and his actors do the work.

George Beats Sherry.

It is genuinely painful to watch, and it changes the movie.

George’s assault on Sherry is shocking in a way that goes beyond the violence itself. Movies have traditionally been reluctant to show realistic, sustained physical violence by a parent against a child, particularly in an ordinary domestic setting. Parker offers us very little protective distance. This is not a monster attacking a child in a horror film; it is a father beating his daughter.

The scene also abruptly destroys an illusion the film itself has helped create. Sherry has been treated as an adult—allowed into her parents’ sexual lives, encouraged to question their lovers and permitted to participate in their marital warfare. Her precociousness can even make her irritating. But when George attacks her, all of that disappears. She isn’t George’s equal in an argument. She is his daughter, and she is a child. The disparity in power becomes horrifyingly clear.

That is why the scene remains perhaps the most powerful in the movie. Parker, who so often overstates his emotional points, doesn’t need metaphor or musical commentary here. The violation itself is enough.

George’s violence is terrible precisely because he isn’t portrayed as a conventional monster. He is a furious, humiliated and increasingly dysregulated man doing something appalling to someone he loves.

And in beating his daughter, George is also destroying himself. He is destroying his identity as father at precisely the moment he is already losing his identity as husband. His desperate attempt to regain control ensures that he will lose even more.

It is the film’s turning point.

A Family Without a Pressure Valve

This leads to a larger problem with Shoot the Moon: the movie is manipulative.

Parker is determined to give the audience a high-powered emotional experience, and he constructs the family almost as a sealed pressure vessel in order to achieve it. Every possible relief valve seems to have been removed.

There is no therapist. There is no sensible friend who remains outside the conflict. There is no effective institutional intervention. Even Frank, initially the comparatively sane outsider, gets drawn into the emotional system.

The result is a family that seems capable of combusting at almost any moment. And that is precisely what Parker wants us to anticipate.

Certainly real families can become catastrophically dysfunctional. But real life also contains interruptions—friends, relatives, therapists, lawyers, judges, police, schools and simply periods when exhaustion temporarily brings the temperature down. Shoot the Moon allows remarkably few of them.

That is why the manipulation becomes visible. Parker keeps adding pressure because releasing it would interfere with the experience he has designed for us. Occasionally allowing these characters—and the audience—to breathe might actually have made the eventual explosions more powerful.

Where Are the Other Adults?

That also makes some apparent plot holes more interesting.

Why does nobody suggest therapy? Individual therapy? Couples therapy? Family therapy? This is an affluent California family in 1982, not an isolated household without access to psychological services. Why doesn’t the judge probe more deeply into what is happening with these children? And where are the police?

George enters the family home after the separation and, at one point, locks Faith out. His behavior repeatedly crosses boundaries that today would likely produce considerably more concern about domestic violence, custody and the safety of the children.

Perhaps these omissions aren’t entirely accidental. The movie needs George and Faith trapped together emotionally. A therapist might insist upon boundaries. A judge might impose them. Police involvement might establish them by force of law. Any of those interventions could release pressure from Parker’s carefully sealed vessel. The film cannot really afford to let that happen.

It Was 1982

Some of this simply belongs to its time.

Everybody seems to smoke. Adults speak to children about matters that would now raise eyebrows. Divorce, sexual liberation and therapeutic openness were represented differently in popular culture. Some behavior that the film appears to present as refreshingly candid now looks astonishingly boundaryless.

Yet that dated quality also makes Shoot the Moon fascinating. It has become an inadvertent cultural document of a particular moment in American upper-middle-class life.

It also belongs to a period when American movies were intensely interested in the intersection of family and marital discord with psychological deterioration. Robert Redford’s Ordinary People appeared only two years earlier. The later The Ice Storm (1997), although set in the 1970s, would revisit strikingly similar territory: adults consumed by their own emotional and sexual needs while their children absorb the consequences.

This dissection of the supposedly secure middle-class family was part of the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Shoot the Moon. The family remained intact as an ideal even as filmmakers became increasingly interested in what might be happening behind its closed doors.

Except, in Shoot the Moon, there hardly seem to be any closed doors.

The Final Descent

Without revealing the ending, Parker takes George’s rage to a devastating extreme in the final sequences.

George appears to cross into something approaching insanity in the legal rather than colloquial sense: for those moments, the distinction between right and wrong seems to disappear for him. Rage overwhelms judgment. He acts without meaningful regard for the harm his actions may cause other people—or himself.

That is perhaps the logical destination of the George we have been watching. He has progressively lost his marriage, his authority, his emotional control and finally his ability to restrain his anger according to its consequences.

Such catastrophic rage is not merely a cinematic invention. In real life, domestic violence can escalate to the point of homicide and murder-suicide, when destruction of others and destruction of oneself become horrifyingly intertwined. Parker takes us uncomfortably close to that territory.

And then, in the midst of the devastation, George reaches toward Faith and weakly calls her name.

It is a striking callback to the tearful man we met at the beginning. Suddenly the rage falls away and Parker asks us once again to see George’s vulnerability and pain.

It works.

And it is also manipulative.

After taking George to a place where we may find his behavior almost impossible to forgive, Parker reaches for our sympathy one final time. The gesture is powerful precisely because Finney can make it powerful. But once again, we can almost feel the director making certain that we experience the emotion he wants us to experience.

That may be Shoot the Moon in miniature: enormously powerful, psychologically perceptive and superbly acted, but never quite willing to trust us to feel enough on our own.

A Tragedy of Boundaries

Beneath the cigarettes, fashions and early-’80s assumptions is something that hasn’t dated at all. George and Faith cannot establish boundaries.

They cannot quite remain together and cannot quite separate. Faith sends George powerful messages of rejection and attachment simultaneously. George responds to loss by attempting to reassert control. Frank enters a family that has not remotely finished dismantling its previous structure. Sandy sensibly understands that an affair need not become a new marriage. And Sherry is pulled into adult emotional territory until she becomes one of the principal participants in a drama she never created.

That is ultimately why Shoot the Moon remains a tragedy.

Not because a marriage fails. Marriages fail.

It is tragic because the adults cannot contain their failure within the adult relationship. Their rage, sexuality, jealousy, loneliness and confusion spill outward until the children are living inside them.

Shoot the Moon is sometimes much too much. Parker hammers home points his actors have already made perfectly well. There are scenes that verge on melodrama, narrative questions the film conveniently avoids, and moments when the machinery being used to manipulate our emotions becomes plainly visible.

But when it works, it hurts.

Recommendation: See it. But understand what you’re agreeing to. Shoot the Moon is designed to manipulate your emotions, and it does so very effectively. Keep in mind, too, that you are watching an artifact of the early 1980s, a period fascinated by marital breakdown, psychological deterioration and the instability lurking beneath apparently comfortable family life.

More than forty years later, I no longer find it the uniformly powerful film I remembered. I find something messier and ultimately more interesting: an uneven, excessive and sometimes devastating portrait of a family in which everyone wants intimacy and nobody seems capable of establishing the boundaries that make intimacy safe.

Parker doesn’t merely show us a family approaching combustion. He seals the exits, turns up the pressure—and makes certain we’re close enough to feel the explosion.

Addendum: Interestingly, Shoot the Moon was well recognized but apparently won none of the major awards for which it was nominated. It accumulated seven significant nominations.

Cannes Film Festival (1982): Alan Parker — Palme d’Or nominee; the film played in the official competition.

Golden Globes (1983): Albert Finney — Best Actor, Drama; Diane Keaton — Best Actress, Drama.

BAFTA (1983): Albert Finney — Best Actor.

National Society of Film Critics: Diane Keaton — Best Actress.

New York Film Critics Circle: Diane Keaton — Best Actress.

Writers Guild of America: Bo Goldman — Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.

It received no Academy Award nominations, which is rather striking given Finney and Keaton’s recognition elsewhere.

Dana Hill’s performance as Sherry received surprisingly little awards recognition, despite the fact that she holds her own opposite Albert Finney and Diane Keaton and is central to the film’s most devastating scenes. Hill went on to work in film, television, and voice acting, including playing Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Her career and life were tragically short: after living with type 1 diabetes from childhood, she died in 1996 at just 32, following complications that included a diabetic coma and stroke. Her performance in Shoot the Moon remains a striking reminder of how much talent was lost.