Moonstruck

Moonstruck opens with various romantic shots of New York with a giant full moon shining down on everything. We see the Metropolitan Opera all decked out for the winter and preparing to put on La bohème. All this while Dean Martin’s corny “That’s Amore” plays, because this is also a movie about loud and dramatic Italian Americans. But before you prepare to watch the cheesiest romantic comedy of all time, Cher as Loretta walks into a funeral home and the director’s name is displayed over a corpse. All good romances have some darkness so they don’t tip into overly sappy, and Moonstruck is about infidelity and heartbreak as much as it is about passionate love.

Loretta is a bookkeeper, going from business to business, interacting with the owners. Cher is dressed down, with frizzy hair that has some grey in it, and wears a small gold cross necklace. She’s only 37 but acts much older. She’s sweet and caring but cynical and jaded. She cleans up the funeral director’s tie after he spills food on it and then, when a flower shop owner says how romantic the rose bouquet he’s preparing is, she disagrees because they’re going to end up in the trash anyway. But when he hands her a rose, she smiles and thanks him. She’s has a tender side that she keeps buried.

She goes out to dinner with her boyfriend Johnny, played by Danny Aiello as a nice but inept dumbass. Johnny is about to visit his dying mother in Italy. When he tries to order fish, Loretta says no, it will upset his stomach on the plane, and tells the waiter he’ll have the manicotti instead. Just as the dessert cart pulls up, Johnny casually asks her to marry him. Loretta isn’t having it, insisting he get down on one knee. He hesitates, worrying about getting his suit dirty, then does it. When she asks where the ring is, he says he forgot. A man at the next table tells Johnny, “I would’ve sprung for the ring if it was me, capisce.” Loretta tells Johnny to give her his pinky ring, which he reluctantly does. Then she says yes. This terrible proposal tells us all we need to know about this couple: Johnny is a bumbling idiot and Loretta takes care of him. She deserves better.

Before Johnny gets on the plane, he gives Loretta a number to call. It’s his brother Ronny, who he hasn’t spoken to in five years. He holds up his left hand to emphasize the point, glances at it, and grimaces. This is hilarious foreshadowing. While watching Johnny’s plane take off, Loretta meets an old woman who tells her she put a curse on the plane because her sister, who stole her husband, is on it. This is more hilarious foreshadowing. Loretta says she doesn’t believe in curses, and the woman says she doesn’t either, but Loretta doesn’t look so sure.

Loretta knows that her fiancé is a dud. When she tells her parents about the engagement, they’re unimpressed. Her dad calls Johnny a big baby, and her mother asks if she’s in love with him. Loretta says she’s not, but she likes him because he’s sweet. Her mother approves because when you love a man, they mistreat you because they know they can.

She goes to see Johnny’s brother Ronny, played by Nic Cage. He works at a bakery, sweating in a white tank top, shoveling dough into a firey oven. As Loretta approaches him, he pulls his right glove off with his teeth and guesses that she’s there about his brother. When she says they’re getting married, all the other workers stare as he gets angrier and angrier while talking about Johnny. He demands that one of them, Chrissy, bring him the big knife so he can cut his throat and Loretta can tell Johnny on his wedding day what he did. Chrissy refuses, shouting, “I tell you I won’t do it!” He slowly peels the glove off his left hand, revealing a wooden hand, and says that five years ago, he was engaged. Johnny came in to order some bread, Ronny got distracted, and cut his own hand off. When his fiancée found out, she left him. Loretta doesn’t get it, saying it wasn’t Johnny’s fault, but Ronny’s too far gone in his traumatic memories, shouting that he doesn’t care because, “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!” Chrissy tells a coworker, “This is the most tormented man I have ever known.”

Loretta goes to Ronny’s place to talk. He plays a record of La bohème about a couple who fall passionately in love and have a tragic ending. She makes him a steak he didn’t ask for. When he says he wants it well done, she tells him it’ll be bloody instead. He loves the steak. She tells him her story: she resisted family pressure to get married young, held out for love, and then married her husband in a courthouse without any family around. But after just two years, he was hit by a bus and died. She believes her first marriage had bad luck because they didn’t do the proposal and the wedding right, so she’s going to change her luck by doing it all correctly this time and marrying Johnny out of practicality instead of love. She also tells Ronny his story as she sees it: he’s a wolf who felt so trapped by his fiancée he chewed off his own paw to get away. They’re shouting at each other, Ronny stands up, flips the table, runs his fingers through his hair, grabs her, and kisses her. She’s into it, so he picks her up and carries her to the bed. The camera pans to the couple on the poster of La bohème.

Meanwhile, Loretta’s older relatives are having dinner and discussing their views on love. Her uncle Raymond is a complete romantic and remembers when Loretta’s dad Cosmo was courting her mother Rose and would stare up at her window. Raymond woke up one night to the biggest moon he’d ever seen and decided that Cosmo had brought it with him, he loved Rose so much.

That night, Cosmo’s moon shines down on the different couples, each in various stages of love. Rose is wistful because, after being reminded of how much her husband loved her in the beginning of their relationship, now he’s drunk and snoring while she thinks about how she knows he’s cheating on her. Loretta and Ronny hold each other while looking at the moon and he tells her she looks like an angel. Uncle Raymond is again woken up by Cosmo’s moon, although this time it’s actually Loretta and Ronny’s moon. His wife Rita tells him he looks 25 again in the moonlight. He playfully attacks her in bed while she giggles. I adore Raymond and Rita. Just because you’ve been married for decades doesn’t mean you stop loving your partner and having fun with them.

The next morning, Loretta is nervous and regretful, but Ronny is charmed by her. He tells her he loves her, which is when we get Cher’s all-timer double slap: “Snap out of it!” He tells her he loves her and he loves the opera, and if she’ll go with him to the opera that night he’ll leave her alone. She agrees. Even though she confesses the affair to her priest, Loretta is excited about their date and gives herself an incredible makeover. As she leaves a shop with a new dress and shoes, she runs into a couple of nuns. Her Catholic guilt stalks her.

Moonstruck is a story about adults who have been in love before and have suffered heartbreak. The main obstacle isn’t actually Johnny, it’s that Loretta and Ronny each need to heal before they can open up and truly love each other. This healing takes place during their date to see La bohème, an opera about a young couple who fall passionately in love, but in the end, the woman dies right in front of him. Watching this, Loretta feels it deeply and grieves her doomed marriage. Tears streaming down her face, she looks at Ronny, who sees her and loves her back. After the opera, she asks him to take her home. While they walk, he tells her that even though he’s a wolf, she wants to be with him, not his brother Johnny, and she’s about to sell herself short by marrying him. She agrees that maybe she is drawn to Ronny, but she can say no and change her luck. He passionately argues that love “ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes things a mess . . . ” but that’s what they’re here for and, “I want you to come upstairs with me and GET in my bed!” He reaches out his left, wooden hand to her, the source of his own heartbreak, and she takes it. They see each other, with all their pain, heartbreak, and flaws, and fully accept each other.

Everything is revealed the next morning when Loretta goes home. Her mother Rose notices she has a love bite on her neck. Then the doorbell rings. It’s Ronny, and Rose tells him he has a love bite on his neck too. They sit down to breakfast. Loretta’s entire family gradually joins them. Rose confronts Cosmo for cheating on her. He pounds the table in frustration and complains about how miserable he is, but when Rose tells him, “Ti amo,” he calms down and sincerely says the same back to her. This is in line with Ronny’s belief that love isn’t perfect, but it’s what we’re here for.

Then Johnny shows up. He’s back from Italy and says his mother recovered when he told her he was getting married, but he’s worried that if they actually do get married, she’ll die. Loretta takes off and throws the pinky ring engagement ring at him, and as he’s on the ground picking it up, Ronny proposes to Loretta. Shocked, Johnny pops up, on one knee and with the ring in his hand. When Ronny asks him for it, Johnny hands it over, and Ronny slips it back onto Loretta’s finger. A champagne toast to family smooths everything over.

Cher is perfect for Loretta because she’s incredibly smart and confident and seems like she’s lived a lot of life. Nic Cage is perfect for Ronny because he doesn’t ever hold back. This contrast sets up the dynamic of the couple: Loretta is world-weary and practical, ready to settle for a mediocre man like Johnny, while Ronny falls in love with her immediately and isn’t afraid to show it, tossing the table between them out of the way so he can scoop her up and kiss her for the first time.

Ronny loves opera. He’s been hung up on his lost hand and his lost bride, and he needs someone to adore and to call him on his shit. Loretta is a gorgeous, sweet, caring woman who has let her hair go grey at only 37, acting older than her age, and she needs someone to have fun with and who will bring out her playful side and appreciate her. He gives her the adoration and passion she deserves, and she gives him the practicality and common sense he needs. They find in each other exactly what Ronny says love should be: imperfect, necessary, and worth the heartbreak and the healing.

VERDICT: NOT GUILTY