Set in a quaint New England town in the 1970s, “Moonlight Mile” (Touchstone Pictures, PG-13) paints a picture of love, and how it can turn tragedy into a right of passage.

Following the murder of his fiancée Diana, Joe Nast (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself living with her mourning parents as they struggle to continue living without the one tie that bound them all together.

The parents, played wonderfully by Academy Award winners Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon, look to Joe as a window into the life of their daughter they lost, as various memories of her fade away with each passing day.

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Feeling trapped in his temporary home, Joe soon finds himself in an entirely new layer of pain and confusion when he falls in love with a local woman whose boyfriend is missing in Vietnam.

Gyllenhaal is reminiscent of Bud Cort in the classic film “Harold and Maude,” he fills every frame he is in with a steadfast intensity that holds its own besides the actors who join him. In a particularly moving scene toward the beginning of the film, Joe caravans in one of the somber black cars headed toward the church for Diane’s funeral. As the funeral procession passes by, Joe gazes out the window at people milling about, doing their daily activities, and the division of life and death is shown flashing before his very eyes.

“Moonlight Mile,” written and directed by Brad Silberling, uses subtle bits of imagery to give its characters depth and likability. Along with believable plot developments, the film contains a powerful soundtrack that picks the most moving of scenes up off the theater floor and floats them into the subconscious minds of each viewer. This proves that a movie about death doesn’t have to be morbid and sad, but can remind us of the value of living life to the fullest.

Susan Sarandon, who plays Diane’s mother JoJo Floss, acts as comedic balance to the sadness of the other characters. Refusing to be coddled by friends for her loss, she strives to keep the memory of her daughter alive in her mind as vividly as possible by jotting down as many memories of her as she can. While keeping her cool on the outside, she becomes so wrapped up in her daughter that she begins to neglect her own sanity.

Starring in a film that many critics have compared cinematically to his most noteworthy film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman plays Ben Floss, perhaps the saddest character of the film. Refusing to break down in the face of emotion, Ben hides behind Joe instead of believing his daughter is actually gone.

A body of images that does more than just tell a story, “Moonlight Mile” does a fabulous job of welding fluid camera work and a familiar landscape into a moral that death doesn’t just remove a place setting from the table or cause people to cross out names in their address books.

It is a time of transformation.