I like romances. Here's what I liked: the scenery (I got the "feel" of living in rural Louisiana, and that was great); and Matt's good, fatherly words to Dani on the boat were worth the movie. Here's where the movie failed me. Though I love Sam Waterston, I'm a northerner who's now lived in the South for 14 years, and see here and elsewhere that when northerners (Sam's from Boston) try to play Southerners, they get so much wrong, which Sam does. I like his fatherly role, but his style, mannerisms, and accent are just out of place as a Louisiana dad. If I were a Southerner, I'd feel very poorly represented. Sometimes the writing was just bad, with characters saying things way too "philosophy of life-ish." They were little monologues that were out of place. Lastly, with the writing, characters are sometimes having all this emotion one way or the other when "all that" wouldn't be possible to have built up in the character in the short time frame that the storyline proposes. There's betrayal in the movie that is simply accepted by all the characters (but one), so the person wronged is never given any sense of consolation or true apology. That left me wanting. Maureen's character was flat--in the end, I needed some kind of character growth (realizations) in her that the writer(s) never delivered. That was disappointing.
Review of The Man in the Moon
