In our new Team series, members of The Film Experience wax rhapsodic on movies they can't help watching frequently and can't turn away from if they stumble upon them. Here's Deborah Lipp...
I ain't no freaking monument to justice!
As with many of my favorite movies, I find Moonstruck endlessly quotable. I open with a quote in the hopes I can restrain myself from doing nothing but quoting in the course of this write-up.
We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die!
Oops.
Moonstruck is infinitely watchable because it works on so many levels...
It’s a romantic movie; a testament to the power of romance, and also a mockery of that kind of romance. It’s a rom-com and a family comedy. The script is subtle enough that you can find new insights almost every time you see it, and it’s also just freaking funny. Scenes stand alone well enough that I’m happy to watch it from the middle if I’m channel-surfing, yet the whole thing hangs together perfectly.
I had seen the movie several times before I realized, it is not merely a film centered around a visit to the opera, Moonstruck is an opera, and the rewards of the film multiply when viewed through that lens. Suddenly, everyone’s heightened emotions and stilted yet thrilling self-expression makes perfect sense!
I honestly don’t know why it took me so long: It clues you from the opening, which shows the crew setting the stage for the central Lincoln Center performance of La Bohème. When we meet Loretta (Cher), the Metropolitan Opera scenery truck drives past. The film is filled with everything operatic; warring siblings, big speeches, deathbed scenes, passionate embraces, even a bruja issuing a curse. Loretta breezes through all of this with seeming indifference, uninterested in the grand gesture. She’s marrying Johnny (Danny Aiello – absolutely hilarious) precisely because she doesn’t love him. Of course, the events that unfold will change this, just as the performance of La Bohème brings her to tears.
Moonstruck is also delightfully sexy, and unusual in its matter-of-fact portrayal of mature sexuality. By “mature” I mean older people are having a lot of sex—both marital and adulterous—not just younger, prettier people. That was especially notable in 1987. This film loves its older married couples, and celebrates them.
The movie purports to be about family; even the tagline tells us so (Life. Family. Love.) Several times throughout, the importance of family is stressed and the toast at the end seems to instruct us to understand “Family” as the capital-T Theme. But is it? Moonstruck is utterly unsentimental about family. Consider: Cosmo (Loretta’s father, magnificently played by Vincent Gardenia) refuses to pay for his daughter’s wedding. Loretta has a sister who remains unmentioned until the final scene; she lives in Florida and no one seems to miss her. Johnny and his brother are estranged. Loretta is so blasé about her future mother-in-law that she says...
“She's dying. But I could still hear her big mouth.”
(Oops, I did it again.)
No, what Moonstruck is really about is the vagaries of love; it’s about betrayal and reconciliation (both familial and romantic). An early scene in a liquor store with arguing mom-and-pop proprietors pretty much sets up the whole movie: She gets jealous, they argue, he flirts with her, they make up. The cycle of betrayal, sexuality, and commitment are present in a two-minute scene, and now you know what your movie will be.
I’m more than five hundred words in and I haven’t even mentioned Olympia Dukakis! She is, naturally, perfect.
I love everything about this movie: Cher, Gardenia, Dukakis, Aiello, and Nicolas Cage in probably his best role. Love the Brooklyn locations. Love the sex. Love every word of dialogue. Love its sweeping ambition, and its attention to detail. I love the freaking dogs.
previously on "Over & Overs"
Julie & Julia (Ginny), Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade (Lynn) and Moonrise Kingdom (Ginny)