GOOD MOON ON THE RISE

Happy Oscar weekend everybody!

As an aesthetic or meritocratic measure, the Oscars are a travesty of course, & always have been. Probably all contests based on subjective judgment of artistic work are travesties. Probably back at the City Dionysia in 442 BC, somebody was muttering “Look, Antigone was good, I just don’t think it was the play of the year. I think they just figure they owe Sophocles after he got hosed on Oedipus Rex.”

Travesty or not, the Oscars are usually good for a laugh or two, & they do often honor good movies. Last week a friend of mine mentioned on facebook that she & her husband were watching one of their favorite movies: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”

Ah, Moonstruck.

The Wife & I count this movie, which turns 25 this year, as one of our favorites as well. Oscar liked it, too: It won for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, & Best Screenplay.

In Moonstruck’s main plot, woman falls in love with her fiancé’s estranged brother. In the subplot, an aging, successful businessman cheats on his wife. To someone who’d never seen the film, that description might sound more like the basis for a sordid, Arhur Miller-ish melodrama with a violent, tragic ending than a warm, eccentric romantic comedy.

Part of Moonstruck’s achievement is that it manages to be both romantic & fiercely honest about love. The fickleness, the brevity, the irrationality, & the wide streak of selfishness that characterize even the grandest amores are fully acknowledged, & cheerfully mocked, & yet somehow the movie convinces us of love’s transcendence. Plus, it’s one of the funniest films of the ‘80s.

The story centers on a Loretta Castorini (Cher), an Italian-American widow pushing 40. An accountant, she lives in a palatial house in Brooklyn, exquisitely shot by cinematographer David Watkin, with her gloomy father Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), an affluent plumber, & her gloomier mother Rose (Olympia Dukakis). Gloomiest of all is her grandfather (Feodor Chalaipin), who moves around in a wake of small dogs—the only time joy registers on his face is when he gets them to howl at the moon.

Loretta agrees to marry her dull, pleasant boyfriend Johnny (Danny Aiello), who by her own admission she likes but doesn’t love, before he leaves for Italy & the deathbed of his vociferous, energetic mother. While he’s away, Loretta goes to invite his brother Ronnie (Nicolas Cage) to the wedding, & the two fall immediately in love. Meanwhile, Rose struggles with the awareness that Cosmo is cheating on her.

That’s the plot, but it does no justice to the richness of the movie, which works on a surprisingly broad canvas, with minor characters ranging from Loretta’s customers to Cosmo’s, Ronnie’s coworkers, the waiters at the restaurants, or random passersby like the vitriolic old crone with whom Loretta has an odd exchange at the airport. In formal terms, the resolution of the plot is a bit of an anticlimax, really, but while you’re watching the movie it’s comedic bliss, & utterly satisfying.

Indeed, this is one of those rare & precious movies where everything somehow went improbably right. Cher did her best work as an actress in Moonstruck, & Cage probably had his finest hour here, too. But the supporting actors & bit players are sublime without exception—in particular Louis Guss & Julie Bovasso as Loretta’s Aunt & Uncle, & John Mahoney as a coed-loving college professor who happens into dinner with Rose & wistfully discovers the pleasure of a mature woman’s company.

The director, Norman Jewison, did fine work before & after this film, but nowhere else showed this flawless a touch. John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the Oscar-winning, highly quotable script, has never topped it—most of his subsequent work has been brilliant in flashes but badly uneven. But Moonstruck’s dialogue, for all its idiosyncratic poetry, still sounds blunt & natural in the mouths of these actors. The happy irony is that this celebration of love’s glorious imperfection is, in itself, pretty much a perfect movie.