"Love don't make things nice; it ruins everything!"

October, 4th
Moonstruck, (1987)
Nicolas Cage is Ronny Cammareri

"I lost my hand! I lost my bride!"

Italians can make me uncomfortable. Big Jewish and Irish families, too. All those raw emotions just out in the open being shared; all those expressions of familial love. Deep in my blood flow the puritanical genes of my ancestors that reject any big display of emotion if it could potentially make anyone else uncomfortable. My people bottle that shit up for everyone's safety.

Watching the family in Moonstruck was like watching a nature doc on TV. I recognized it as being real to some people's experience but the characters I identified most with were couple whose bathtub Vincent Gardenia fixes. My people!

 

Though it may be alien to my experience I really liked Moonstruck. It's a great romantic comedy shot through with the kind of cinematic melancholy that went out of style with the '90s.

Loretta (Cher) is a widow nearing middle age who has resigned herself to marry Johnny (Danny Aiello) despite not loving him. Marrying someone you have affection for, you are comfortable with, without the messiness of love seems like a safer option than putting herself out there again. She tracks down Johnny's estranged brother, Ronny (Nic Cage), to invite him to the wedding and end an ancient feud between the two siblings. Ronny is a bitter mess of a man. He's still mad at Johnny for distracting him one time while he was cutting meat and inadvertently causing him to cut his own hand off. Then his girl dumped him for not having a hand. It's not really Johnny's fault but Ronny is set in his resentment ("What do I look like? A monument of justice?" he asks Loretta during his first Big Dramatic Speech).

Of course Loretta and Ronny fall for each other. As the trailer below spells out, in Moonstruck's world love is both symbolized and emboldened by the moon itself. This trickster moon enchants men and women as often as it lays their lives to waste. In a key scene Loretta's uncle tells a story of waking half-asleep to see the moon outside his window and blame it's brightness for the love Cosmo has for his sister. "La bella luna." says Loretta's grandfather. "The moon brings the woman to the man."



The characters in Moonstruck are almost puppets to the influences of "Cosmo's moon". It pushes them to bed each other and lures them away. Unlike most rom-coms, Moonstruck presents love as a nuisance first and foremost ("Do you love him?" asks Loretta's mother about Johnny. "No." "Good.") Loretta resents Ronny for pulling her out of her torpor with his love for her. Ronny's love is all-encompassing with a violent power behind it. When he sets his sights on Loretta it's either marry her or die alone and broken-hearted. Meanwhile, Loretta's father (Gardenia), mother (Olympia Dukakis), aunt and uncle all find their relationships being tested and affirmed by the same lunar force.

Cher and Dukakis both won Oscars for Moonstruck and Gardenia was nominated. They're all fantastic, as is Cage. Birdy saw Cage the Dramatic Actor at his most histrionic but Moonstruck uses him like a secret weapon. Cage was personally chosen by for the role of Ronny by Cher - who threatened to walk off the film if he was not hired - based on his performance in Peggy Sue Got Married. Apparently both she and director Norman Jewison share my affection for Charlie Bodell.

Moonstruck was originally titled The Bride and the Wolf and Cage approached his role with a note of literality. Reportedly coming off of his own bad breakup, Cage plays Ronny with an electrifying, brooding intensity that he would repeat in a weaker brew many times in the future. In a fascinating 1988 story from the LA Times Cage grants a rare interview to writer Kristine McKenna and tells her about the freedom he had with Peggy Sue, calls The Best of Times a "very bad television show" (gasp!) and describes how he brought Ronny to a darker place than Jewison intended, bringing his wolfishness to the fore. It's particularly notable in the scene where he first takes Cher to bed and, in lieu of sweet nothings, describes hollowing her out and eating the skin off her bones. It's weirdly sexy. Or maybe just gross. Either way, I liked it.

Moonstruck was also Oscar-nominated for John Patrick Stanley's screenplay (which won) and best picture and director (it lost in both categories to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor). Stanley, writer of Doubt and Joe vs. the Volcano (a weird comedy as dear to my heart as Raising Arizona) is a master of dialogue and the big scenes in Moonstruck feel appropriately big. The best, of course, is the climactic kitchen scene where all the characters meet (except for John Mahoney AKA the dad from Frasier) and end up expressing their love for each other. It's a writer's showcase that director Jewison has called the hardest scene of his career (Jewison was actually fined by the actors' union because he wouldn't let them go to lunch until they had perfected the moods of their characters in the scene. He refused to even set up cameras until they had run through it to perfection).

But the writing is never showy in its greatness, nor is Jewison's directing. The man responsible for In the Heat of the Night and Fiddler on the Roof (and Rollerball!), Jewison is not a sensualist or stylist like Francis Ford Coppola or the Coen brothers. Instead he lends his films a lively realism that immediately welcomes you in. He manages to make peoples and cultures - hot-headed Southern good old boys, old world Jews, New York Italians - seem familiar even to people like me and that couple getting their bathtub fixed.

Nicolas Cage was twenty-four when Moonstruck began raking in Oscars (one year younger than me! Good fucking God, my life) That LA Times article touches on his confusion and discomfort with becoming a sex symbol overnight. "I feel like there's a big, wet fish slapping itself against the inside of my head right now," he says. He continues:

"One of the reasons I did Moonstruck was because I thought it would allow me to take more of a chance with my next film, which is a low-budget black comedy called Vampire's Kiss that hardly has mass commercial appeal written all over it," he said. "I play a man who's insane and thinks he's a vampire. Everyone told me not to do it, but the script grabbed me by the collar and screamed, 'If you don't do this movie, you're a coward!' I figure that in order to succeed in the film business, you can't be afraid to roll the dice. And as long as I'm betting, I want to bet everything I've got."

Next time: Nicolas Cage bets everything he's got on Vampire's Kiss!