By Scott Ross
In the late ’80s, after a decade of sour, smart-ass movies, most an outgrowth of the popularity of television’s Saturday Night and nearly all of which militantly eschewed romance, at least as an adult would recognize it, Moonstruck seemed like a gift from the Gods: A bright, funny and emotionally centered romantic comedy full of wonderful characters and delightful actors, a narrative arc that while modest was at the same time intelligent, fulsome and satisfying, and the unmistakable feel of talented people engaged in work that inspired them. The picture was a lush Valentine, and although the studio didn’t think much of it, its audiences were ecstatic.
They had every reason to be. John Patrick Shanley’s original script was intended to be a play, and could have been very effective in that form, although nothing in it is noticeably stagy or artificial, and it’s deeply pleasurable. While the movie is not remotely realistic — indeed, its romantic naturalism is a large part of its charm — its oddball characters are quirky in an entirely human way. And the actors make them shimmer, from Cher in the leading role of a widowed, self-styled frump avoiding romance because she believes her first marriage was cursed to Gina DeAngeles as a bitter old woman Cher encounters at the airport and who gets one of the picture’s biggest laughs. Shanley’s background, of course, is Irish, but he observed Italians closely from an early age and it seems to me he gets the details right, albeit refracted through the prism of a gentle, slightly screwball comedy. I don’t think Norman Jewison’s direction could be improved upon, nor Lou Lombardo’s sprightly editing, and David Watkin’s rich, warm cinematography is the perfect complement to the movie’s close-knit family milieu.
The perfect cast, nearly every one of whom contributes at least one small bit of comic greatness, includes Olympia Dukakis as the wife and mother certain her husband is philandering and who gets a lovely moment of lightly flirting connection with a stranger at a neighborhood restaurant; Vincent Gardenia as her wayward mate, convinced that a midlife affair will forestall death; Danny Aiello as the hag-ridden mama’s boy to whom Cher is engaged; Julie Bovasso and Louis Guss as her erotically playful aunt and uncle; John Mahoney, both melancholy and amusing as a communications professor unable to communicate with the female students he is perpetually drawn to; the adorable Anita Gillette as Gardenia’s plump little dumpling of a paramour; and Feodor Chaliapin Jr. as the family’s ancient grandfather, as besotted by that big, cheesy moon over Brooklyn as his granddaughter and whose shining face as he extols “La bella luna” becomes the rhapsodic spirit of the picture.
Nicholas Cage has never been a favorite of mine; he strikes me as one of those troubled figures who, if he didn’t have acting as an outlet, would probably either harm himself or end up in a padded room. Cher envisioned him in the role of her unexpected inamorata, lobbied hard for his casting (she threatened to pull out of the picture if he wasn’t in it) and she was right. Cage somehow manages to bring a warmth and sweetness as well as an edge of dangerous rage to the part of the embittered baker that coalesce and resolve into something very close to lovable, a word I don’t think I’ve ever associated with Cage outside of this movie.
As Loretta, who has convinced herself that not marrying her deceased husband in a church somehow caused his accidental death and who is afraid to make herself vulnerable again, only to find love in the unlikeliest place and with, seemingly, the least apposite of men, Cher is utterly luminous. This is not an ugly duckling role — Loretta isn’t unattractive, she simply doesn’t care enough to cultivate her natural pulchritude — but Cher is as convincing in the movie’s first half, with her graying, stringy curls and thick eyebrows as she is when she gives in to her buried romanticism and indulges in a Cinderella makeover. (Literally: The salon she frequents is called Cinderella.) When, on the street facing Cage and her own warring emotions (and, reportedly, freezing in the New York cold) she looks up with her great, shining doe eyes, the snow softly falling in an echo of La bohème, the opera they’ve just seen, she is the embodiment of romantic hope in a world that, when not suppressing love, does little to encourage it. And she gets one of the great moments in American movie comedy when Cage’s one-handed baker confesses he loves her and she slaps his face and barks, “Snap out of it!” This was a line you heard quoted over and over in the late ’80s, and for good reason: It summed up both Loretta’s unyielding pragmatism and a national mood of cynicism that couldn’t quite believe in the possibility of love, even as it longed rather desperately for it.
Moonstruck somehow encapsulated that desire, and gave an audience as starved for romantic comedy as for romance itself, an outlet for its yearning. That no Hollywood studio capitalized on that rather obvious niche is unsurprising; whenever an odd movie breaks out of the cookie-cutter mold, defies the odds and connects with a large swath of ticket-buyers it gets labeled “a non-recurring phenomenon.” That almost no other contemporary screenwriters or directors bothered (quick: name the great romantic comedies since) says something else entirely, about them.
Copyright 2020 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 