Scandal in the Catskills

Whenever A Walk on the Moon was going to air on cable, I would set the reminder. I get an emotional kick out of this film with the double-entendre title for three reasons: 1)Viggo Mortensen plays a romantic (OK, lusty) leading man; 2)Diane Lane is doing her unfaithful best five years before her Academy Award-winning turn in Unfaithful; and 3)I get to experience, albeit vicariously, a smidgeon of the goings-on at summertime resorts in the Catskills. Let me work backward. ... As a young girl living on the East Coast in the '70s, I recall my cousins' families and mine driving upstate New York to Sullivan County, where an aunt and uncle had a great big country house straight out of The Waltons. With sunny songs such as "Love Will Keep Us Together" and "Philadelphia Freedom" playing on the radio during those road trips, life felt like it could not get better. As we approached the Catskills, I recall the colorful billboards announcing the different summer resorts. Once I got up the nerve to ask the adults in the car why we never went to any of those resorts and was told that we would not be accepted there. So as I got older, I always fantasized that the Catskills resorts had to be boat loads of fun to be so exclusive and all. Dirty Dancing, while fictional, definitely gave me a glimpse into the exciting lifestyle behind those wonderful billboards. I can say this because I once worked with a woman who was raised in the '50s and who told me that many of the scenes in Dirty Dancing reminded her of long-ago experiences at various Catskills summer resorts. All of this to say that when watching A Walk on the Moon, I feel like an outsider looking into a life I never was privileged to live. ... Diane Lane is a force to be reckoned with when portraying characters with dysfunctional marriages. A Walk on the Moon predated Unfaithful by five years, so we viewers get a chance to see how Lane has perfected acting out the visceral female erotic response that, perhaps, many women envy. That pivotal scene in the van in which she and the Blouse Man seem totally oblivious to a major milestone in world history is no less intense than the scene in Unfaithful when she is on the train reminiscing about quivering beneath (hunka-hunka-burnin'-love luscious) Olivier Martinez hours earlier. Watching her squirming in her seat on that train, as she alternates between bliss and angst, I felt as if I had had the affair! She knows how to embody a free spirit, whether in Unfaithful (double-crossing Richard Gere as her attorney husband, who ironically stakes his career on loyalty), Under the Tuscan Sun (American divorcee meets Fellini's La Dolce Vita), or here, in A Walk on the Moon. ... Lastly, regarding the No. 1 reason I love A Walk on the Moon: Viggo Mortensen. His gaze alone is intense. He possesses a certain je ne sais quoi, an erotically hypnotic, intangible quality that actors such as Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen translated very well. Serving as brilliant contemporary examples would be Robert DeNiro, Idris Elba, Clive Owen and Daniel Sunjata. Female actors also have that seductive quality: Kathleen Turner and Faye Dunaway as past examples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- and Jessica Lange, Angelina Jolie and Vivica Fox as current examples.

So, why not add A Walk on the Moon to your DVD collection. It is guaranteed to be a blast.