Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [67]
A gaunt, grim-faced Jeremy Irons gives a marvelous performance as Nowak, who heads a group of Polish construction workers who have been hired under the table, so to speak, to renovate a well-heeled government official’s home in London. They have to smuggle their equipment into the country, as neither Poland nor England would look kindly upon this scheme. (After all, they’re willing to work much cheaper than a British crew.) They have no work permits, so for the duration of their time in the UK, they sleep inside the house. It’s up to Nowak—the only one who speaks English—to provide food and look out for them. When he walks by a shop window and sees on television news coverage of the events back home, he is dumbstruck. He decides not to tell his cohorts, worried that they may walk off the job. As fear sets in, and funds run low to sustain himself and his crew, Nowak becomes increasingly desperate, and perfects his shoplifting skills. It’s all about survival—at least until the job is finished.
Moonlighting is incredibly suspenseful, but where it might have been dark and dismal it is ironic and mordantly funny. Aside from the basic absurdity of the situation, there are Irons’s increasingly daring and outrageous schemes to fleece his local supermarket and flirt with a neighborhood salesgirl.
Had Skolimowski made a sober or somber parable about political upheaval in his homeland, the film wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining as it is. Moonlighting is affecting precisely because it is so unpretentious—and entertaining.
92. MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON
(1990)
Directed by Bob Rafelson
Screenplay by William Harrison and Bob Rafelson
Based on the novel Burton and Speke by William Harrison and the journals of Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke
Actors:
PATRICK BERGIN
IAIN GLEN
RICHARD E. GRANT
FIONA SHAW
JOHN SAVIDENT
JAMES VILLIERS
ADRIAN RAWLINS
DELROY LINDO
PAUL ONSONGO
BERNARD HILL
ROSHAN SETH
ANNA MASSEY
LESLIE PHILLIPS
OMAR SHARIF
ROGER REES
Bob Rafelson is one of the most interesting and individual talents in contemporary American film. As cocreator of the faux rock group the Monkees, he produced (and sometimes wrote and directed) their hit TV series, cowrote and directed their inventive feature film Head, and then enjoyed his greatest critical and commercial success with Five Easy Pieces, starring another Monkees writer, Jack Nicholson. He and Nicholson continued to collaborate over the decades, on The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Man Trouble, and another of this book’s selections, Blood and Wine. Among his other notable films are Stay Hungry and Black Widow, but nothing in Rafelson’s portfolio would lead anyone to expect a film as grand, or far-reaching in its ambitions, as Mountains of the Moon.
This handsomely mounted saga, photographed by the great Roger Deakins, turns back the clock to a time when the English-speaking world was captivated by daring explorers like Sir Richard Burton. At a time when travel was arduous and methods of communication primitive, he didn’t hesitate to leave Victorian England, and his wife, behind to embark on bold, dangerous expeditions. (He had many other talents and interests, including linguistics and a fascination with erotica that inspired him to translate the Kama Sutra.) This film focuses on his search for the source of the Nile River in the mid-1800s. Patrick Bergin, who should have springboarded to stardom on the strength of this performance, is a charismatic Burton, with Iain Glen equally well cast as John Hanning Speke, the ambitious dilettante who accompanies him.
Historians have speculated about the relationship between these two disparate men—one a genuine adventurer, the other an opportunist—who eventually became bitter enemies. Each man also flirted with homosexual