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
