No lift off here
The meeting of Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen is one of Hollywood’s most charming relationships- one that’s shown to be just as lovely when the two are on screen together. Which makes their meet-up movie “Pontiac Moon” all the more disappointing. Calling it a terrible, go nowhere dud doesn’t do it justice. Based on how quietly it came and left theaters, I think it’s safe to say Paramount didn’t even think it releasable.
Danson plays an eccentric science teacher named Washington Bellamy, which is already a bad start. Given a perm and told to shuffle around the classroom with a cane, nearly everyone of his lines is delivered with inspirational whimsy so hackneyed, you want to barf. “You know what I love about cars, they always know which way they want to turn.” It’s the kind of crap that would make even Forrest fall over laughing.
Washington lives with an agoraphobic wife named Katherine (Mary Steenburgen), whose fears seem to be extending to their son (Ryan Todd) as well. He decides he needs to do something for the kid and so he plans a trip to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon mission: they will go on a road trip in his Pontiac, from Nevada to a place called Spires of the Moon in Idaho, which will cover the exact mileage from the Earth to the moon.
Nothing happens in this movie. The road trip has father and son meet a variety of hostile rednecks who serve no purpose, they meet a Native American (Eric Schweig) who provides nothing more than fortune cookie wisdom, and in the film’s most embarrassing scene, the town Sheriff goes after them in a dueling car chase where Danson keeps smacking the top of the Sheriff’s car with his cane.
The worst material seems to be given to Steenburgen though, whose finally does decide to leave the home to chase after her husband and son. But shaking her way through clutching the steering wheel and running around like a blithering idiot every time a person comes near her, there’s barely any humanity, reason, or insight into this character. She just comes off like a frazzled ditz.
There is something of substance that haunts this husband and wife and the film is, in essence, about their rediscovery of actually living, barely. The incident that haunts them in question is barely brought up or acknowledged; Steenburgen describes it at one point but for some reason it’s done in cutaways, the scenes interspersed between whatever dumb thing Danson and the kid are up to. Doing it in this way loses any emotional momentum, at one point it even seems like the film is trying to make light out of even this.
This is just a soulless, empty, godawful attempt at uplift, so phony, hackneyed, and cloying it serves no purpose whatsoever. In the end I bet the only thing I bet the actors are thankful for is the marriage that came from it, otherwise it’s a career-worst from both.