Movie Review : ‘Pontiac Moon’: So Many Miles for Symbolic Journey

“Pontiac Moon” is one of those movies in which every action is meant to be symbolic. It’s so symbolic--make that Symbolic--that it never really makes you care about what it’s symbolizing.

Ted Danson plays Washington Bellamy, an oddball high school English teacher who, on the eve of the 1969 Apollo moon landing, drives his 1949 Pontiac Chief 1,776 miles--as in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence--in order to run the mileage up to 238,857--the distance between the Earth and the moon. He’s a big believer in the “one perfect act,” and he’s gotten it into his harebrained noggin that this odyssey will turn his life around.

His son Andy (Ryan Todd), a moon-shot buff, is along for the trip, and there is lots of father-son bonding and unbonding and rebonding going on in that Pontiac. Washington’s wife, Katherine (at least she’s not named Martha), is played by Mary Steenburgen in a role that’s perhaps too jarring for this frail falderal.

Katherine is intensely phobic about leaving her home--she hasn’t set foot outside in seven years. But when her husband and son set off on their trek, she muscles up the courage to follow them. Her pursuit is comical--her vehicle is one of those ‘60s amphibious cars that floats--but it’s also touching. Her fears are motivated by a past family tragedy, and only her love for her son keeps her from seizing up in terror. Steenburgen gives Katherine an addled pluckiness that makes her the movie’s true hero.

Unfortunately, most of the time we’re on the road with Washington and Andy, and their roadside encounters with rednecks and hard-scrabble law officers as they move through Utah and Arizona and New Mexico are enough to make similar scenes from “Easy Rider” seem almost egalitarian. For a movie that’s so preachy about virtue and “perfect acts,” “Pontiac Moon,” directed by Peter Medak from a Finn Taylor and Jeffrey Brown script, goes in for some really crass common man caricature. Is this really the spirit of ‘76?

Danson is so intent on playing a kookie (yet wise) eccentric that he’s not believable for a moment. He mugs and prances and tries to work up a vaudeville rhythm with Ryan Todd. They keep getting upstaged by the scenery: Monument Valley once again lights up a movie. (Shouldn’t it be getting a special Oscar by now? Or maybe the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award?) There are some nice bits from Cathy Moriarty as a seen-it-all waitress, and Eric Shweig plays a Vietnam vet Native American with a minimum of hokum. But by the time we get to the inevitable desert-walk/moonwalk parallels, you may want to start your own trek up the aisle.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for language. It includes descriptions of a family auto accident and depiction of phobic behavior.

‘Pontiac Moon’

Ted Danson: Washington Bellamy

Mary Steenburgen: Katherine Bellamy

Ryan Todd: Andy Bellamy

Cathy Moriarty: Lorraine

A Paramount Pictures release of a Robert Schaffel/Youssef Vahabzadeh production. Director Peter Medak. Producers Schaffel, Vahabzadeh. Executive producers Jeffrey Brown, Ted Danson, Bob Benedetti. Screenplay by Finn Taylor, Brown. Cinematographer Thomas Kloss. Editor Anne V. Coates. Costumes Ruth Myers. Music Randy Edelman. Production design Jeffrey Beecroft. Set decorator Robert J. Franco. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes.

* In limited release at the Mann’s Criterion, 1313 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica, (310) 289-MANN.