Film review

  • Moonstruck

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Norman Jewison (1987)

    Sally and I saw this Norman Jewison film on its original release and must have watched it two or three times since.  It had been some years between the last viewing and this one but Moonstruck feels as good as new.  It’s among Hollywood’s most penetrating, as well as enjoyable, romantic comedies.

    John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the screenplay, is an Irish American from the Bronx.  Moonstruck’s principals are Italian Americans in Brooklyn.  Dean Martin sings ‘That’s Amore’ over the opening titles; the story that follows is fuelled by a medley of Italianate tropes, cultural and temperamental – Puccini opera, food and drink, people who are voluble, volatile and have a strong streak of fatalism.  It sounds a commercially cute package, and I suppose it is, but Moonstruck is richer than that and increasingly so.  Each of the main characters – there are at least half a dozen – has good lines and different sides and, thanks to the first-rate acting, is vividly individual.  The ensemble playing, admirably orchestrated by Norman Jewison, is a delight.

    Thirty-seven-year-old widow Loretta Castorini (Cher), who works as a bookkeeper and lives with her parents in their Brooklyn Heights brownstone, accepts a proposal of marriage from her long-standing beau, the middle-aged worrywart Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello).  He then immediately departs for Sicily to be with his dying mother.  Johnny asks Loretta, while he’s away, to invite his younger brother Ronny, a baker, to the wedding:  there’s been bad blood between the brothers since Ronny lost a hand in a workplace accident that he blames Johnny for.  Loretta’s father, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), is a plumber – as someone from a different world will later remark, that’s how he can afford to own ‘a whole house’ in Brooklyn Heights.  Besides, Cosmo looks after the pennies – he refuses to pay for his daughter’s forthcoming second wedding.  He doesn’t like Johnny anyway.  Loretta does but she doesn’t, as she tells her mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis), love him.  Droll, rueful Rose is relieved:  ‘When you love them they drive you crazy ‘cause they know they can’.  She’s well aware her husband has a mistress.  This is Mona (Anita Gillette) – only slightly younger but with a (mutton-dressed-as-lamb) vivacity that Rose has lost.  She looks to be in mourning for her romantic past.

    The Castorini household is completed by Cosmo’s ancient father (Feodor Chaliapin Jr) and his many dogs.  Rose’s brother Raymond (Louis Guss) and his wife Rita (Julie Bovasso), who run a local store, are regular visitors to the brownstone.  Over dinner there, they remark on the previous night’s bright, full moon – it reminded Raymond of a moon that shone once when Rose and Cosmo were courting (‘When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie’, etc etc).  Loretta is not at this gathering but at confession.  Within an hour or two of meeting angry, hungry Ronny (Nicolas Cage), she was in his bed.  (In the confessional she slips in ‘I slept with the brother of my fiancé’ between a couple of minor sins; the priest asks her to repeat ‘that second thing you said’.)  After telling Ronny they can never see each other again, she grants his supposedly last request of accompanying him to the opera – La bohème.  Their visit to the Met – where the audience includes Mona and Cosmo, startled to be caught red-handed by his daughter during the interval – inevitably reinforces Loretta and Ronny’s mutual ardour.

    Johnny proposes to Loretta in an Italian restaurant.  Their fellow diners include a forty-something man and his much younger female companion – they have words, she throws water at him and storms out.  On the night of the opera, Rose dines alone in the same place.  At the next table is the same man, Perry (John Mahoney); he’s with a different girl but suffers the same, embarrassing fate as before.  Rose takes pity and asks if he wants to join her for dinner; Perry, who teaches communications at NYU, enthusiastically agrees.  The water-throwers were both recent students and the professor talks at length about his failed relationships.  Rose sadly concludes that, ‘What you don’t know about women is a lot’.  He walks her home; on the way, they bump into dog-walking Grandpa Castorini, who instantly gets the wrong idea.   When they reach Rose’s house, Perry asks if he can come in.  Rose says no, sparking an exchange that, as well as a particular favourite of mine, is typical of John Patrick Shanley’s sharp, sympathetic dialogue (perfectly delivered by John Mahoney and Olympia Dukakis):

    Perry:              People at home?

    Rose:               No.  I think the house is empty.  I can’t invite you in because I’m married and I know who I am.  You’re … shaking.

    Perry:              I’m a little cold.

    Rose:               You’re a little boy and you like to be bad.

    Perry:              We could go to my apartment.  You could see how the other half lives.

    Rose:               I’m too old for you.

    Perry:              I’m too old for me.  That’s my predicament.

    Shanley went on to write, most notably, the stage play Doubt: A Parable and the screenplay for the 2008 film adaptation, which he also directed, but Moonstruck, unassuming as it is, is the finer  achievement.  I found plenty of the lines had stayed with me – I was saying them inside my head as they were about to be spoken.   There are enduring images too – especially Cher, done up for her night at the opera:  Loretta goes to the hairdresser then impulse-buys a burgundy-coloured dress and matching high heels.  It’s not only Ronny’s breath she takes away when he meets her outside the Met.  Her early-next-morning walk home, still in her Cinderella-at-the-ball outfit but distractedly kicking a tin can down the street, is memorable too.

    The closing scene takes place in the capacious kitchen of the brownstone:  getting all the main characters together for this climax, as might happen on stage, reflects Moonstruck‘s well-made-play quality.  Ronny arrives, then Johnny, then Rita and Raymond.  Loretta means to break her engagement but her fiancé gets there first.  His mother, on her deathbed, suddenly revived at the prospect of Johnny’s impending wedding; ‘If I marry you,’ he explains to Loretta, ‘my mother will die’.  Loretta can go ahead and marry his brother.  Sheepish Cosmo agrees to pay for the wedding.   Rose asks her daughter if she loves Ronny.  ‘Yeah, Ma, I love him awful,’ replies Loretta.  ‘Oh God, that’s too bad,’ her mother says.

    Everything works – not least the eclectic soundtrack.  Even Vikki Carr’s interminable lovelorn ballad ‘It Must Be Him’ is effective as used here:  Cosmo has it playing ad nauseam.  The nicely modest original music is by Dick Hyman.  Most of the cast members, however many other roles they’ve played, are chiefly associated with their Moonstruck characters:  Olympia Dukakis, Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia, Louis Guss, Feodor Chaliapin Jr, Anita Gillette – and, even if she’s not primarily thought of as an actress at all, Cher.  The only exceptions are Nicolas Cage, John Mahoney (who would be the father in Frasier) and, perhaps, Julie Bovasso (John Travolta’s mother in Saturday Night Fever).

    There’s a lot to do with death.  Woken by her husband during the night, Rose, the second she comes to, asks, ‘Who’s dead?’  When she later asks both Perry and Johnny the question ‘Why do men chase women?’ she already knows the answer:  ‘Because they fear death’.  Ronny makes an impassioned carpe diem appeal to Loretta.  Grandpa Castorini and his dogs pay a visit to the cemetery where the old man’s wife is buried.  There’s also, of course, the volte face at death’s door on the part of Johnny’s mother (Gina DeAngeles), which her overgrown mummy’s-boy son declares a miracle.  Moonstruck is a survivor too.  It may be concerned with mortality but this film was built to last.

    3 June 2021

  • Surge

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aneil Karia (2020)

    In Aneil Karia’s first feature Surge, Ben Whishaw is Joseph, an airport security worker at Heathrow who walks out of his job and into the breakdown he’s heading for from the word go.  The early workplace scenes are fascinating.  From an opening long shot of Joseph, the camera gradually closes in.  Making his way towards the security area, he’s inconspicuous to others but Whishaw has the slightly over-deliberate walk of someone having to concentrate in order to maintain control.  Sequences showing Joseph doing his job stress the odd physical intimacy of frisking strangers for a living.  This may be his daily routine yet things are out of joint.  An elderly man (Bogdan Kominowski), subjected to a partial strip-search, is exceedingly upset.  Another frisked passenger persists in claiming to know Joseph, who gets aggressive in fending off the man’s attentions.  It’s Joseph’s birthday and he’s bought a carrot cake to share with Lily (Jasmine Jobson) and other colleagues.  The banter among them is unremarkable, Joseph’s way of eating anything but:  using a fork, he bites down on it as well as his slice of cake.

    Life outside work is hardly less tense.  Near the entrance to a block of flats, the noise of the motorbike on which its owner (Perry Fitzpatrick) is always working, drills into and enrages Joseph.  Inside his flat, where he lives alone, he drinks from a glass in the same way that he used the fork.  When he visits his parents for the weekend, his father Alan (Ian Gelder) picks him up from the station.  Joseph arrives late; Alan is stewed up; as he hurries to pull out of the car park, his car makes contact with a pedestrian.  The man isn’t physically hurt but a violent row ensues.  Back home, Alan, struggling on his own to shift a disused washing machine into the back garden, angrily ignores Joseph’s offers of help.  The family’s nerves are shot to pieces even before they sit down for Joseph’s birthday dinner.  After timidly reproving her son for swallowing too loudly, his mother Joyce (Ellie Haddington) is hysterically upset to discover that he took ‘just a carrot cake’ in to work.  Joyce has got Joseph exactly the same cake and put a few candles on it – now he’s spoiled her birthday treat.  It’s not so much predictable as inevitable when Joseph bites right into his water glass, cutting his mouth badly on the shards.

    He returns to work but his behaviour there is unhinged and he impulsively quits.  He turns up at Lily’s flat, offering to fix the new television she complained wasn’t working, then goes to buy the cable she needs.  It’s only £4.99 but Joseph is out of cash.  The shop’s card reader won’t accept his card, which an ATM then eats.  A nearby bank will accept nothing but a driving licence or passport as ID, and he has neither.  It’s enough to drive you mad:  in Joseph’s case, this really is the tipping point into nearly unrelieved mania.  He robs the bank, buys the cable, gets the TV working, has hurried sex with Lily (she doesn’t object, though she’s surprised), leaves the flat and robs another bank.  (He uses the well-worn technique of passing a scribbled note to a clerk while concealing his other arm to pretend he’s holding a gun.)  This is far from the end of Surge but it is the point by which it’s becoming monotonous.  It stays that way for most of the remainder of its 105 minutes.

    Present-day London – the cacophony of traffic noise and sirens, the (pre-Covid) crowds oblivious to Joseph – is, from his point of view, like a nervous breakdown made manifest.  It’s a pity that Aneil Karia opts to illustrate his protagonist’s state of mind in such a visually obvious way:  the juddering camerawork expresses Joseph’s disturbed apprehension of his surroundings.  Once he’s lost it, the film doesn’t build, except in the sense that you know things will get a lot worse before they get better (late that night, for example, he’s hurt in a traffic accident then beaten up).  Ben Whishaw is fearless and inventive – miming a swimmer entering the water when Joseph dives into a hectic street, quietly purposeful as he trashes a hotel room – but his playing, thanks to Karia’s approach, is too showcased.  It’s no surprise to read reviews praising this, inaccurately, as a ‘career-best’ performance from Whishaw:  his virtuoso acting is conspicuous as never before.

    Surge has suggestive elements.  You occasionally wonder if hyper-sensitivity is what causes Joseph to break down – if the overwrought distress of his parents, or of the weeping man he strip-searched, is as perceived by, and unbearably painful to, Joseph alone.  But if he does possess this kind of emotional x-ray vision, it’s erratic.  The shop assistants, bank and hotel personnel he encounters are played naturally and neutrally, and there’s no indication that Joseph sees anything different in them.   When he wanders into a wedding reception taking place in the hotel he’s booked into, the vileness of the best man (Chris Coghill) whose speech he interrupts isn’t something exaggerated in Joseph’s mind:  others in the wedding party are horrified by what they’re hearing.  The fraught interactions between Joseph and his wretched, infantilising mother are hard to ignore.  Having calmly disembowelled the hotel room quilt, he clambers inside its ‘skin’ and tries to sleep; he might be returning to the womb.  The image articulates strikingly with Joyce’s concluding speech (very well delivered by Ellie Haddington), in which she tearfully tells her son that, when carrying him, she kept praying he’d be kept safe.  This element is certainly interesting but it, too, feels half-baked.

    The screenplay, by Rupert Jones and Rita Kalnejais, derives from Karia’s twelve-minute Beat (2013), also starring Ben Whishaw.  Knowing that makes it difficult to avoid thinking Surge is essentially a short film stretched thin.  (Jim Cummings’s engaging Thunder Road (2018) was another recent instance of this.)  It ends with Joseph, still awaiting arrest, in an untypically relaxed mood.  Watching a group of Asian women dance in the street, he smiles, seemingly at peace.  If he’s got whatever was wrong out of his system, it’s hard to know how – beyond the fact that Joseph must be exhausted by the events of the last couple of days.

    3 June 2021

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