"Moonlight Mile"

Silberling is attuned to the right details every minute. In one scene Ben and Joe sit side-by-side on a wooden bench in a grassy, open area, bathed in late-afternoon New England sunshine. Ben starts out discussing his optimistic business plans for himself and Joe (unaware of how unenthusiastic Joe is about them), only to find himself drifting into an explanation of how distant he felt from his daughter. Ben sits awkwardly on the bench, his legs dangling, and we can see, for instance, how badly hemmed his pants are -- for all his dreams of big-money success, this isn't a man who pays attention to the telling details. A shadow crosses the sun, casting his face in semidarkness; moments later, the sun reappears. It's the kind of effect a cinematographer (in this case, Phedon Papamichael) would never be able to plan, but it's a wondrous accident that works perfectly.

Silberling's finely detailed script was clearly written with actors in mind, and Hoffman, Sarandon and Gyllenhaal all rise to meet the challenge: They make a marvelous ensemble. Hoffman is the most shadowy figure of the three, and for that reason the most frustrating. We can never really see what's eating away at him, because he has so habitually closed himself away from everyone around him. But his performance rounds itself out in his last scene, where he shows that the love of even a distant father can be its own fragile and remarkable thing, no less valuable than that of a dad who shows everything.

Sarandon's JoJo is part romantic-comedy wisecracker and part no-nonsense New England bohemian. Her marriage to Ben is mysterious in its workings -- they seem tremendously ill-suited to each other -- but Sarandon shows us, in subtle ways, how it has thrived over the years on both tenderness and habit. At one point she practically kicks Ben out of the house, telling him it's time to walk the dog. Then she calls after him, "Lower your shoulders, Benjamin" -- she's more aware of Ben's hunched-up, stiffened carriage than he is -- and then, briskly, "Come back to me." It's Sarandon's finest performance in years, one that makes the best use of her devil-may-care intensity and also plays off her wonderfully idiosyncratic, intelligent beauty.

But it was Gyllenhaal I found most affecting. His performance is a largely interior one -- more so than in his earlier performances in pictures like "Donnie Darko" and "Lovely & Amazing." I suspect some people will think he's just not doing much, but for me, that's exactly the key: Joe is so immersed in grief that he's had to remove himself from it as a survival tactic -- he's drifting and paddling alongside it, like a cowboy who has dismounted his horse to ford a river.

In Gyllenhaal's performance, it's the little things that count: He has gone to the post office to retrieve the already-mailed wedding invitations, and he sits at a desk in Ben's office with the envelopes stacked in front of him. Joe listens as Ben yammers on about some unnecessary detail, but when the unwieldy stack of invitations topples softly onto the desk, his eyes follow the slip-siding pile automatically, drifting away from the palpable present and back to the memory of a planned (and now disintegrated) future. The characterization is built out of small, unstudied looks and gestures that we catch only on the fly. Gyllenhaal plays the whole movie as a guy who betrays his deepest feelings when he thinks no one is looking; it's an intensely private, and quietly magnificent, performance.

Separately and together, Gyllenhaal and Sarandon make perfect sense in what may perhaps be the funniest serious movie about grief ever made. Silberling, God love him, is not immune to the charms of slapstick, especially as a way of cracking up the most dutifully solemn moments: Post-funeral, a friend of the family's stoops to say a kind word to the gastrically troubled family dog, who promptly hurls all over her shoes. In a small, outlandish role, Dabney Coleman spins out lines of dialogue that are pure Dada. And at one point well into the movie, as a follow-up to an intensely personal conversation, JoJo turns to Joe and says smartly, "Isn't it the tits you and I have the same name?"

The line, like something lifted from a '30s gangster picture, sums up the loose, comfortable rapport between them, but it's also typical of the casual, easy warmth that envelops the whole movie. "Moonlight Mile" is a picture about the odd, shapeless weight of suffering, and the ways it doesn't exactly disappear so much as turn into something else entirely. The tough part is that you can't know what that something else is until you get to it. But the comforting reality is that it's right there ahead of you, waiting patiently for you to catch up.

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