Serious Moonlight is supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, but it's got long odds. First, there's the unlikely premise: Meg Ryan duct-tapes cheating husband Timothy Hutton to the toilet until she can force him to fall back in love with her. Then, there's the side-story of loss, as Serious Moonlight is based on a script by Adrienne Shelly, who was brutally murdered before her film Waitress was scooped up at Sundance in 2007.
And finally, there's one other thing. And I think you know what that thing is.
That'd be Meg Ryan's face, so drastically reconfigured and all the more odd when you see it put through Ryan's familiar romcom paces. (I struggled to find a screencap that didn't look like a cheap potshot at the actress, and it wasn't easy.) It's just become too difficult -- and disconcerting -- to ignore Ryan's plastic surgery anymore, and while Hollywood can be awfully rough on women over forty, I don't think it's going to help matters when those women don't look like women after forty anymore. Meg Ryan's chief asset has always been her relatability to women. How will they recognize themselves in her when they don't even recognize her?
VERDICT: Can fight the Moonlight.