If they ever make a movie from Dennis Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, it’s going to be an expensive one.
It won’t be the fancy sets, because Lehane’s characters troll through the seedier side of Boston and the Berkshire Mountains. Then again, if they use real houses, the movie carpenters will have their hands full, cleaning up all the bullet holes and sprayed blood after each scene. So I guess that could run up costs significantly.
But really, I think it’s the cast that’s going to break the budget. Moonlight features a private eye hunting around for a runaway teen. We end up with two runaway teens whom I can’t always tell apart. Then Private Eye Patrick treads into gang territory and we have two gangs, one Hispanic and one Russian. I don’t know why we need both.
To Lehane’s credit, we have a moral dilemma at the heart of the story. Amanda is one of our runaway teens. Years ago, Amanda was a kidnapped child and Patrick was the P.I. that returned her to her no-good parents when she would have been better off with the kidnappers. So poor Patrick spends Moonlight Mile wondering if he’s going to make the same mistake a second time around.
Lehane is no newbie. With ten books to his name, I could go on a Lehane binge that would last me all winter. But what if all the other books are as doubled-up on characters as this one was?
What if all the characters are as flat?
In one scene, Patrick visits a car thief in jail. The guy talks with so much “bro” and “dude” and “&*@^#>*”, it’s a bit like adding candy bars to your chocolate milk. Lehane works so hard at getting the lingo right that it feels wrong.
But I let it pass. I don’t hang around jailbirds and gangsters, so for all I know, they really can’t say something as basic as “shut the door” without all the “bro” and the “dude” and the “&*@^#(*.”
Soon Patrick stops in at Amanda’s school to ask around. He talks to the principal, to the teachers, to the teenage girls, and not a one of them can say much more than “like” and “ya know” and “ewwww!”
Yeah, we all know that teenage girls say this stuff. Read Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons and you’ll see what I mean. Then read Wolfe’s acknowledgments at the back of his book and you’ll get the impression that he hung out on college campuses a good long while, watching the animals at the zoo. Lehane, on the other hand, writes like he picked up his ideas from an after-school special.
And then there’s the father of one of the runaways. I get that Lehane needed a horrid dad. Otherwise, why would the girl leave home? So Lehane started by giving the guy a few heavy-handed notions about parenting, then it seems the author couldn’t stop himself. Let’s have him sputter out a lot of right-wing garbage while we’re at it.
All through Moonlight Mile, I never could lose myself in the story.
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These tasty Garlic Cheese Breadsticks added a lot of excitement to tonight’s dinner, although one of our diners complained that they had “too many sprinkles.” But that’s just the opinion of a six-year-old who would rather play on Grandpa’s iPad than eat. The rest of us liked them just fine.
We ate them with the Barefoot Contessa’s Macaroni & Cheese and Lemon Cooler Cream Cake. Let me just warn you that the contessa’s dish serves 6 at a whopping 950 calories each, but that’s only because a serving turns out to be 16 ounces!
We left off the tomatoes and we should have cut the bread crumbs waaay down. In this case, I agree with the six-year-old, who kept hunting for a bite that wasn’t contaminated with more “sprinkles.”
Sort of like Lehane’s book.
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