I’ve been writing recently about comforting watching, and I’ve now made it to what most people would turn to if they wanted to take their dearest emotions out for a gentle spin: laughing and crying through a romantic comedy. Moonstruck (1987; available to rent on Youtube and many other places) deals in the heaviest of themes (love, sex, death, hate) in the lightest of modes, yet penetrates far more deeply into life’s mysteries than so many sombre tellings. And it has Cher and Nicolas Cage shouting at each other in a sweaty bakery.
Norman Jewison directed from John Patrick Shanley’s script, turning its writer from off-Broadway playwright to Oscar winner in an eighteen-month stretch (a miracle he quickly reversed with his terrific but unpalatable Joe Vs. the Volcano). Jewison is part of a cohort of directors – along with Sidney Lumet, Sidney Pollack, Robert Wise and George Miller – who bring too much craft to their work to be journeymen, but (to their credit) never qualified for auteur status. Even without the studio, each project had the feeling of a ball clumsily tossed, half inflated, that still came back with them spinning it on their noses while tap dancing. Having directed musicals (Fiddler on the Roof, Jesus Christ Superstar), drama (In the Heat of the Night), heist (The Thomas Crown Affair), sci-fi (Rollerball) and romantic comedy (Best Friends), it makes sense that something so hard to land and rootless would be within his broad wheelhouse. Supposedly Jewison and his producing partner Patrick Palmer were both sent the script and Palmer called shortly afterwards to chew out the agent for passing on such dreck. Within the half hour, Jewison – unbeknownst – phoned the agent, bewitched and desperate to direct. Reading it, it’s easy to see both sides of this coin. The script is rife with logical jumps and coincidences, the lines clatter against each other (taking Loretta to his bed, Ronny exclaims ‘Son of a bitch!’ with no sequel or reasonable explanation) and is full of ripe, almost unspeakable poetry (‘I want to cut you open and crawl inside of you. I want you to swallow me.’) that is as only half intended as comedy. Even on set, it remained a dubious offering. Olympia Dukakis, recalling the shoot for which she and Cher both won Academy Awards, recalled, “One day we were sitting around talking, and somebody asked Cher what she thought was going to happen, and she gave it the thumbs-down... Nobody really expected too much out of it.”
As the film starts, Loretta (Cher) cares dutifully for everyone around her, yet with a hand seemingly half-way wrapped around a rolling pin. Settling the neighbourhood accounts of Little Italy, she plans to make a pragmatic marriage to Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), having been widowed several years before, with the premature grey to show for it. Her father Cosmo (Vincent Gardinneri), plumber with the patter of a poet, is stepping out on his deflated wife Rose (Olympia Dukakis). As Johnny flies to Sicily to sit at his mother’s death bed, he asks Loretta to help him reconcile with his brother Ronnie (Nicolas Cage) in his absence so he can attend their wedding. Loretta finds Ronnie with the temper of a wolf with his paw in a trap, but they quickly overcome their difference and find themselves in bed, at the opera, and ultimately together.
Moonstruck is centred around a constellation of love problems, many of which have the same solution as the cause of others. Here embracing love’s reckless abandon sets you free, elsewhere it turns you into a fool. Like a Shakespeare comedy, couples with problems are allowed to undergo enchantment, to don carnival dress while the moon sits full, sipping merrily from the East River. Hints of the fairy tale are sprinkled throughout, dilating the possibilities and salving any concerns about coincidence and realism. The script’s original title was The Wolf and The Bride, Loretta dons red bedazzled shoes as though preparing for an ecstatic dance into the infinite and old lovers are called from their sleep, the moonlight casting them as though they are in love’s first blush.
From the start, the miraculous and the quotidian sit side by side: the credits play out as a Mack truck wends its way through Brooklyn’s streets, carrying the magic of New York Opera’s scenery. We then see an undertaker step away from a corpse and declare himself a genius while dropping butter on his tie. Commerce and cosmos sit side by side. After Johnny proposes in a neighbourhood restaurant, we cut to the waiters lamenting, ‘A good bachelor customer for twenty years!’ Romance is a source of life, but it’s also the source of tips.
The place where magical thinking gets its greatest flex in Moonstruck is in performance. Besides Cosmo’s hyper-Italian hand gestures, we have Nicolas Cage as affected, preening and outlandish as Jean Cocteau’s Beast (not cursed by a spell but by a bread slicer). Channelling Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang, the inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Cage finds an appropriately outsize mode for Shanley’s outsize dialogue. Cast despite reservations (age, looks, past form) and almost removed mid-production for taking his Jean Marais impression too far, Cage’s performance is like a gigantic tanker that can still turn on a dime, one minute barking, ‘Bring me the big knife I’m going to cut my throat’, the next whispering plaintively, ‘Is it just a matter of time till a man opens his eyes and gives up his one dream of happiness?’ You need a magical setting and a lot of grace to sell both. Sometimes looking like Ratso Rizzo’s slightly more handsome cousin and at others like the reincarnation of James Dean, Cage is fitting for someone we need to trip quickly between love and hate.
And that line is crossed very quickly. So many of the great romantic comedies – When Harry Met Sally, The Shop Around the Corner, Four Weddings and a Funeral – are about missing each other, the long road to the obvious truth of love at first sight (and all the better for the running time). Moonstruck – under influence of the pizza-pie moon – reverses that. There’s less than 13 minutes of screen time between Loretta laying eyes on Ronnie as he stares down the blazing intensity of the bread oven, and him lifting her damsel-wise to his bed (and that includes three intercut scenes happening elsewhere!). It puts no impediments in love’s path, even having the good sense to dispatch her fiancé to Sicily for almost the duration.
Rather than add obstacles to Loretta and Ronnie’s love, Shanley uses the influence of the moon to bring three other stories to the boil, all of them about the long-lived experience of love rather than its first bloom. We have her father, who has yielded to amour fou injuriously; her mother, who refuses to yield to new love; and her aunt and uncle who find new love with each other. Like a version of Richard Linklater’s Before… trilogy where all the episodes are collapsed into one – first love, reconnection and bittersweet consummation – it defends itself from sentimentality by fleshing out love’s complexities as it ages.
Loretta’s father Cosmo is pursuing a trivial middle-aged woman. We see him in his element, upselling a couple on the most expensive piping. Then we cut to him – holding court like Don Corleone – recounting this sales prowess to her. ‘You have such a head for knowing. You know everything,’ she moons. He seeks undiluted admiration, to see himself through the perfumed haze of first love. He takes her to see La Bohéme at the Metropolitan Opera, where – in an operetta-worthy coincidence – he inevitably bumps into his daughter and Ronnie. Blinking at each other as though a spell is broken, caught in the same crime, they quickly acknowledge each other and disappear into the night.
Meanwhile, Loretta’s mother Rose has come to neighbourhood restaurant The Grand Tecino for a meal for one. At another table, greying professor Perry (John Mahoney) has yet another drink thrown in his face by a twenty-five year old lover. The two now solo diners convene. Tearing off her husband’s limbs by proxy, she berates Perry for his pursuit of young women. He lays his folly on the table with guardless honesty – in short supply in her marriage – which ends up charming Rose. They leave together, walking the cold streets arm in arm. Asking to come up to her house, she refuses, not because of the chance of discovery but, as she says, ‘because I’m married. Because I know who I am.’ Unlike Cosmo, she accepts that self-knowledge often means sacrificing momentary pleasure.
For such a verbose script about characters who love to talk, its truths shift in silences: in the opera house, as you listen to an old fool tell his story, and as Mahoney is left on the pavement, staring up at Rose, who can play out the night they might have together otherwise and chooses her life as it is. In the final scene of the film (a collective bearing of home truths around the kitchen table), Rose demands that Cosmo stops seeing his mistress. He stands, slaps the table as though about to make a violent rebuttal, sits in silence, and agrees. ‘Te amo,’ she says, as though reaching out an arm. ‘Anch'io ti amo,’ returns Cosmo, hands rejoined. Sometimes love is about leaving your senses, at other times it’s about returning to them, and Moonstruck has the broadness of mind to encompass both.
It also has the same broad intelligence on the proximity of love and hate, starting with the family (a place where most can easily relate to this complexity). Tony Kushner said of Shanley’s abilities to see both sides of the coin that ‘He's not a misanthrope, but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them.’ At first, the film’s loopiness, its quickly flipped polarities, read like kooky affectation. By its end, it’s more like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test of a first rate intelligence (‘the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’). This is a film about renewal, knowing hurt will come but hoping anyway, about cynicism hosed off. In the film’s opening scenes, Loretta curses a lover spending money on flowers ‘that are going to end up in the garbage’ yet is simultaneously charmed by the gift of a single rose. Having waited for the perfect man only to see him killed by a wayward bus, she has the right to distance herself from romance. If cynicism is a romantic’s protection against life disappointments, then we see at the film’s conclusion the reconciliation with that promise of romance. That’s a clear thread between Big Night, Wonder Boys and Moonstruck and why they’re comforting to me: all of them are honest about life’s pain, how our principles are challenged, but leave the door open to the possibility of renewal, even if the characters within the piece don’t always achieve it. Or as Ronnie has it,
Love don’t make things nice. It ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.
Recommendations
If you’re in the mood for something with clear appeal that won’t tax you too much, I recommend zombie gorefest Blood Quantum (streaming on Shudder). It’s an First Nations take on the principles of zombie movies that sees only the indigenous peoples of North America immune from the plague.
Cher and Other Fantasies: I didn’t get a chance to finish it (maybe because of the risk of costume overload) but this bizarre TV special seems to be up there with the Kate Bush Christmas special for self-indulgence pushing into wild surrealism.
Actress by Anne Enright: An antidote to the simplifications that go on when we rectify a whole life along ‘feminist’ lines, this is a very funny, merciless book about what it is to have your life partly owned by people who barely know you (thanks Sarah).