“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.”
As my church’s former pastor was fond of saying, there are only two ways to appear righteous in the eyes of man. The first and preferable option is to undergo a process of sanctification and actually become righteous. The second is to grow old, whereupon the dying flesh naturally loses its lustful appetites. In Moonstruck, a romantic comedy from writer John Patrick Shanley and director Norman Jewison, there is only one principal character who appears righteous—“Pop” Castorini (Feodor Chaliapin Jr.)—but that is because he is old.
No sooner has Pop’s widowed granddaughter Loretta (Cher) accepted a clumsy marriage proposal from Johnny (Danny Aiello) than she finds herself falling in love with his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), a brash, ranting, one-handed baker with crazy ideas in his head. She is swiftly taken “to the bed!” and surrenders herself to him for the first time. When they visit the opera together, Loretta discovers that her father (Vincent Gardenia) is also there, on a date with… well, certainly not her mother (Olympia Dukakis), who knows more than she lets on. Later, though, she too will look outside of her marriage for emotional companionship when she invites a younger man (John Mahoney) to dine with her. When Johnny returns from Italy—where he’d traveled to be with his dying mother—these various infidelities all come to light in a brilliantly written scene set around the Castorini breakfast table which leaves good old Pop crying in confusion.
Twice I took the name of the Lord in vain, once I slept with the brother of my fiancé, and once I bounced a check at the liquor store, but that was really an accident.
Marked by solid performances, sharp wit, excellent comedic timing, thick accents, cartoonish Italian caricatures, idiosyncratic gags, occasional sincerity, lots of food, and a hint of magic realism, Moonstruck is considerably deeper than your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, and it’s all the better for it.