Don't Come Back from the Moon movie review (2019)
Based on a book by Dean Bakopoulos, who also co-scripted with Cheung, “Don’t Come Back From the Moon” follows a young man whose father (James Franco), like so many other dads in the town, has abandoned his family by leaving this dead-end location for good. Franco’s Roman Smalley is onscreen about five minutes, first arguing with his wife Eva (Rashida Jones) about how the town has nothing to offer, then teaching the protagonist how to drive his vintage automobile. In the latter scene, cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj executes the only worthwhile evocation of paternal desertion we’ll see by shooting Roman repeatedly disappearing behind the clouds of smoke kicked up by the donuts being made in the dirt by his car. Behind the wheel is his son Mickey (Jeffrey Wahlberg), who occasionally narrates the film with extraneous, unnecessary snippets of information.
It’s Mickey who repeatedly tells us about Daddies on the Moon, and not once does he make it sound like a place anybody would want to go. Late in his narration, Mickey tells us he imagines his father butt nekkid in a hot tub with beautiful Moon women. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to think about is the nude iteration of my Pops. But Mickey’s vision is in tune with the filmmakers’ unwillingness to delve inside the complex notions of fatherhood and whether they can be toxic. It would rather lean on male stereotypes involving fighting and virility. Making matters worse, “Don’t Come Back from the Moon” doesn’t think too highly of its female characters. The camera kind of leers at them, but not enough to be truly salacious. And the story treads dangerously close to the idea that a woman cannot raise a son successfully.
For example, Roman’s argument for uprooting his family makes a lot of sense as the town is dying and there’s no incentive to stay. Eva digs in her heels, however, and not once are we privy to her reasoning. Once Roman cruelly abandons Mickey and his younger brother, Kolya (Zackary Arthur) at a gas station (the scene is predictable but still manages to sting), Eva is reduced to drinking, staring at the TV and doing haircuts for the teenaged boys in town, one of whom she makes out with because, with no grown men around, the women in this town start auditioning for “To Catch a Predator”. “With the men gone, we became the men,” says 16-year old Mickey on the soundtrack.
