Mark Reviews Movies: DON'T COME BACK FROM THE MOON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 17, 2019

The adult men of a small factory town disappear shortly after the factory closes for good. They leave behind wives and girlfriends and children of various ages, with little to no sign of where they've gone. As one can tell from the title, the kids in Don't Come Back from the Moon create a small fantasy that their fathers and the fathers of their friends have left for the moon. It's not true, of course, even though at least one of the disappeared men leaves a note, scrawled on the mirror of the bar he owned, reading that he has, indeed, "gone to the moon."

Deep down, the kids probably know the truth, but at least a trip to the moon, as fantastical as it may be, makes some kind of sense. In the mind of a child, as well as the mind of the man who bluntly states that he has made a lunar voyage, it's much better than the alternative—that the men simply have given up, abandoned their families, and seemingly possess no intention of returning. It's going somewhere, not leaving home without an explanation. The lie may not make any sense, but it's easier to take than the truth. Sometimes, that's the only thing that can keep a person going.

Despite the fact that the kids and the women and the audience know the reality of this scenario, co-writer/director Bruce Thierry Cheung creates the atmosphere of a fable for this story. As antithetical to reality as that approach may seem, the overall tone and specific sense of myth actually help to ground this adaptation of co-screenwriter Dean Bakopoulos' novel Please Don't Come Back from the Moon. The grounding, obviously, isn't in the real world. It's in the mind of its protagonist, a teenage boy who's learning that life becomes more difficult as the responsibilities of adulthood are thrust upon him, and the other kids like him in this town.

The teen is Mickey (Jeffrey Wahlberg), who notes two notable occurrences in his life when he was sixteen. The first is that he got lice, and his mother Eva (Rashida Jones) had to shave his head. The second is that his father Roman (James Franco) left for the moon.

Mickey's uncle John (Jeremiah Noe) was the first adult man to leave this place, which was once a bustling locale of industry and tourism. After getting into a fistfight with some co-workers, John leaves before the factory shuts down but well after the nearby lake has mostly dried up, leaving behind the ruins of a hotel and various shops. Now, the town is mostly a desert, surviving only on the presence of the factory.

When that goes away, the men of the town, including Roman, go away, too. Mickey finds himself making meals and generally caring for his initially distraught mother and younger brother Kolya (Zackary Arthur), as well as hanging out and causing trouble with other kids (They tear apart abandoned trailers for scrap to trade to a local collector). The teen also tries to become closer to his temperamental cousin—John's son—Nick (Hale Lytle), who has inherited or learned his old man's temper, and forges a romance with Sonya (Alyssa Elle Steinacker), whose own father (played by Scott Crane) has left her with no one and nothing else—except the family cat, which isn't much in the way of company.

Cheung doesn't spell out any of the concerns of the absent men, partly because the kids don't care to understand what their fathers have done. There's a distinct contradiction in the thinking of the left-behind children. They hate their father for leaving but, still, sense that life might be better, easier, and/or more comprehensible if the men were still around. The conflict here is mostly internal, as the kids attempt to justify or at least explain the men's disappearance by means of fantasy. It's an excuse for men they equally love and hate.

The lack of clarification for the men's motives is also, mostly, because such explanation is unnecessary. The rationales—the plant closing, the lack of jobs or even prospects, the feeling of complete failure—are self-explanatory. More to the point, those feelings also play out within Mickey's story, as the boy soon learns that being responsible is difficult, love is tricky, expectations for what he should be like as a man are high and specific, and life in what has become a ghost town can be quite empty when it's not all fun and games. If there's perceptible and often spoken tension among the kids in loving and hating men who have disappeared, the unspoken tension—and, indeed, the heart of the film—is in watching Mickey gradually transition into the kind of man that his father and his father's comrades turned out to be.

The dramatic question, then, is whether leaving is inevitable or a choice. Is it something in the male psyche, compelling the entire male population of a town to go looking for opportunity, and if it is, is it a sign of either strength—in setting out for something new and unexplored—or weakness—in abandoning life because it has become too difficult? Don't Come Back from the Moon may not be an actual fable, but in choosing a perspective that sees this story as one, the film feels freer to explore these ideas and to provide a message that's much more hopeful than its premise might suggest.

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