The Blu-ray release of “Moonstruck” reminds us of a time when Nicolas Cage mattered and Cher’s face could convey the complexities of falling in love.
The 1987 romance, which earned a Best Actress Oscar for Cher as well as a Supporting statuette for Olympia Dukakis, is like a ballad where the lyrics don’t make sense, but you’re too busy humming along to mind.
Both Cher and Cage deliver, big time, drawing on their mercurial skills to make a spicy ethnic stew. She’s inescapably Cher with a capital “C” yet she’s convincing as a hometown girl caught up in an inappropriate romance. Cage is nothing less than a volcano awaiting eruption.
How could sparks not fly when they share the screen?
Loretta (Cher) believes in luck far more than love. She tried the latter and it ended in tragedy – her husband died in a bus accident. So when a kind but bland suitor named Johnny (Danny Aiello) proposes marriage she gladly accepts. He’s a nice man with a good heart. That’s all anyone really needs. And, at 37, she isn’t getting any younger.
But when Loretta meets Johnny’s estranged brother, Ronnie (Cage), she experiences a wave of emotion she didn’t think possible.
She knows it’s a mistake, but as a certain morally deflated auteur once said, “the heart wants what it wants.”
“Moonstruck” sets its unlikely love story within a Brooklyn culture ripe for ridicule. Director Norman Jewison balances the outsized emotions and social nuances without making either seem transparent. And his take on the New York City borough teems with passion and character. Even the small character parts feel stripped out of a neighborhood you’d swear you once called home.
Cher and Cage handle the rest.
She makes a simple walk down a New York City street into a rumination on love’s transformative pull. Cage, in turn, brings a preposterous character to life, turning his resentment over losing his hand into a new way to evoke a young man’s brooding intensity. The characters’ first embrace seems staged, but just watch them connect on their first date and you know their ardor is genuine.
Yet some of the sequences, including the now iconic, “Snap out of it!” feel a mite precious in retrospect.
Dukakis radiates a feisty maternal presence as Loretta’s mom, and she’s given a wonderful sequence where she connects with a man (John Mahoney) who typically dates women decades his junior.
The full moon deserves a credit here, too, serving as the ambiguous muse for both the main characters and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley who earned an Oscar for his troubles.
The Blu-ray extras include a commentary track featuring director Norman Jewison, Cher and Shanley, plus looks at Italian families and cuisine to complement the film’s themes.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This movie has my favorite final scene in any movie ever. The film has its flaws to be sure, but it still a very enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.
Maybe it’s primarily the theatre grad in me, but Shanley’s script should be dissected by anyone who wants to make a modern romantic comedy. Delectably delicious ialogue.
Shanley seemed like a star on the rise after “Moonstruck,” but his post-”Struck” film work has been a mixed bag. Though I’m told I need to re-watch “Joe vs. the Volcano,” a project that got drubbed during its theatrical release, and I did dig “Doubt.”
Joe Vs. the Volcano never worked for me, even with the mighty Abe Vigoda, and as a practicing Catholic, the Streep/Hoffman duo kept me away from Doubt. Should I give it a shot or are my suspicions pretty accurate? Bear in mind I really liked Pierce Brosnan’s Evelyn, so I can take well-produced criticisms of Catholicism. Heck, Dogma’s an Easter-time tradition.
He wrote “Doubt”? That was a very good film.