In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the zombified Captain Barbossa – cursed to become a skeleton in the moonlight – tells the skeptical Elizabeth Swann that she best start believing in ghost stories — because she’s in one.
In Norman Jewison’s 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck, Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage) communicates a similar idea to Loretta Castorini (Cher). Knocking over a dinner table, Ronny whisks Loretta in his arms. Puffed chest, he announces that they are going into the bedroom. Loretta sighs and lets her head loll back dramatically. Suddenly, the bookish Loretta has to believe in love stories — because she’s in one.
Moonstruck tells the story of Loretta Castorini and her Italian-American family members searching for love. Loretta, a drab widower working as an accountant for family businesses, is far too practical to be looking for love at this point. When she refers to her late husband’s death, Cher’s delivery of “he was hit by a bus” is so offhand she may as well be talking about the weather. Her new fiancé, Johnny (Danny Aiello), is a big baby. A man full of pride and devoid of passion, who can easily follow her directions and stipulations.1 Yet, under her stone-faced cynicism, there’s a romantic just waiting for her turn. When working on the books of the local flower shop, Loretta gripes about how silly it is for men to spend money on something that will just end up in the garbage. “You don’t like flowers?” the florist asks. “I love flowers,” she snipes back, as if the suggestion itself is ludicrous.
To state the obvious, Cher is brilliant in this movie. Not only does she possess the otherworldly star power all multi-hyphenates of her caliber do, but she stands as an outlier from the ever-present romance happening around her. New York has never been more beautiful than it is here, thanks to David Watkin’s cinematography. Deep blacks and blues contrast with the pink neon store fronts, all backlit by the goddess-sized moon hanging over the skyline. It is an Art Nouveau cityscape for the lovers of this world, and Loretta marches past it without batting an eye. Men and women profess their love for each other in grandiose gestures behind every deli counter she visits, or crash spectacularly out of love just a table over from her at the restaurant.2 Loretta watches the world’s greatest romances play out all around her, but she’s just the spectator. It’s a testament to the power of Cher’s performance (and to Jewison’s directing and Shanely’s script) that she feels distant from the love story without ever feeling ironic.3 There is such a firm sincerity to the lavish world around her that it feels unfair she should find herself outside it.
Then she meets Ronny.
Ronny works in the ovens of his bakery, hunched over the flames like Hephaestus at his forge. Loretta arrives to invite him to her and his brother Johnny’s wedding. In the span of five minutes, Ronny reveals his “tragic” backstory, unveils a wooden hand, and threatens to kill himself.4 Loretta looks on with puzzlement, all while the other bakers weep at the operatic performance. Ronny is the Fabio on the cover of a romance novel. A dangerous smokeshow who embodies pure melodrama. A vendetta sworn against his milquetoast brother, cursed to never be whole, a leather-wearing bruiser, and a lover of the opera. He stands in angular poses and speaks in terse poeticisms. “We aren’t meant to be perfect,” he pleads to Loretta. “The snowflakes are perfect.” If it was any other actor but Cage playing Ronny, he would be a cartoonish brute. But there’s an absolute burning sincerity in Cage’s performance. When Loretta agrees to see La bohème with him, she arrives in a stunning post-makeover outfit. Her black curly hair framing her pale face like the moon in the night sky. Cage just breathlessly says, “Thank you.”
While Loretta and Ronny are the central pairing of the film, the family fills the remaining cast. It’s telling that the making-of documentary for Moonstruck begins with interviews of older Italian-American couples – all musing on love, family, and the importance of the kitchen table.
The kitchen table is the skeleton on which the family is built. Rose and Cosmo Castorini (Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia respectively) are the matriarch and patriarch of Loretta’s family, caught in their own torrid love affair. However, Cosmo is blatantly cheating on Rose, which Rose is keenly aware of. It’s not the fact that her pompous husband is sneaking out that seems to pain her, but the fact that the family love has gone. According to her brother, Cosmo’s love for Rose was once the size of the moon. Now he comes home late without even a hello. “Everyone's upstairs!” she shouts at Loretta, mourning the fact that her family no longer gathers around the kitchen table.
Rose’s journey centers on the question of knowing yourself. Rose knows who she is. It’s the less fair sex that perplexes her. “Why do men chase women?” she asks various men throughout her night on the town, trying to make sense of Cosmo’s infidelity. Maybe it’s fitting that each provides a different but equally unsatisfactory answer, allowing Rose to cut straight to the point and calmly confront Cosmo during the film's masterful final scene. Loretta, Ronny, Johnny, Rose, Cosmo, Nonno, Uncle and Aunt – all gathered at the kitchen table, trying to make sense of the film’s various moon-drunk threads in the sobering morning light. It’s a hilariously easy ending for all parties involved, but that’s okay. This isn’t a tragedy like La bohème, it’s a love story.
Moonstruck is streaming on HBO MAX, and is available to rent on most other streaming sites.
Special thanks to Austin Smoldt-Sáenz, Elena Bruess, Joshua De Lanoit, and Max Seifert.
Danny Aiello gives a wonderfully silly performance here. A man who snickers at the notion of a man who can’t “control his woman,” which is exactly what Loretta sees in him.
The lovely John Mahoney plays Perry, an older professor who keeps dating his students. His evening with Rose is one of the highlights of this spectacular romantic comedy and easily led him to his star role on Frasier.
There is a refreshing lack of self-aware comedy here – a curse that continues to plague modern movies to this very day.
Nicolas Cage has always been an argument against naturalistic performances. I’d recommend everyone watch his interview with GQ, where he describes his portrayal of Ronny as being based on German expressionist films such as Metropolis.