Moonlight Mile - 7

This film is about the grieving process. Death is a strange thing, you can't go back in time to the way things were, and the way thing are is in dissonance with what you hoped for. There is no moving on, there is only trying to understand how to respond to reality, death is an exercise in knowing. Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal), a young man is living with his soon to be in-laws(Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon), when their daughter dies. He then has to decide has the hard choice of sticking around or leaving, not knowing his responsibility to her parents. The truth being to painful, Joe ops for the easier path, living as if nothing has really happened, this can only last so long before he realizes that the truth must be made clear so that the grieving can be complete. Joe says this at the trial for Diana's murder: "It was Diana who finally had the courage. She was the one who told me that I didn't want to go through with it. And I guess she's-she's doing it again, cause all of this-all of this is everything that she wouldn't want. She wasn't a bride-to-be. She wasn't a victim. She was strong and real and messed up and wickedly honest, just like her mother. And if I sit here trying to paint it any other way, I... Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just-I thought-I thought that if I could just... paint the pictures that you needed, you know, that... that somehow... that somehow you'd bring these people some peace, finally, and they'd have their daughter back, or... But, uh... that's not how she'd wanna be. The truth is hard. Sometimes it looks so wrong, you know-the color's off, the style's wrong, but I guess it-I guess it's where the good one's live." At the end of this grieving the characters don't "move on" they learn how to really live.