The Travolta/Cage Project #19 Moonstruck (1987)
I vaguely remember watching Moonstruck in the movie theaters with my family as an eleven year old boy and thinking “Who the hell is that Nicolas Cage guy and what the hell is he doing?”
I had a similar response to Cage’s performance in Peggy Sue Got Married a year before when I saw that in the theaters. Looking back it seems a little odd that I saw such quintessentially grown-up movies about regret, nostalgia, the passing of time and love among the middle-aged and decidedly older but I had something of a curious childhood.
I did not realize that Nicolas Cage was doing his Nicolas Cage thing because in 1987 Nicolas Cage wasn’t Nicolas Cage yet. He wasn’t an Academy-Award-winning cinematic icon famous for his pummeling intensity and method actor madness so I found the pummeling intensity and method actor madness of his performance in Moonstruck at once impressive and disconcerting.
Those eyes! #Sexy #Mancrush
Cage is entirely too much by design in Moonstruck. He’s too intense. He’s too crazy. He’s too loud. His fire burns too bright. He’s a charismatic madman in a gentle love story in love with the idea of being in love and with love itself. Cage is WAY too much in a way that paradoxically proves just right.
Cher won an Academy Award for Best Actress playing Loretta Castorini, a pragmatic bookkeeper who opens the film by accepting the proposal of Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello), a good, sweet, solid man she does not love but likes a great deal. Then Johnny flies off to Italy to be with his dying mother, leaving Loretta to visit Ronny, (Cage), her fiancee’s estranged brother in hopes of convincing him to attend the wedding.
Cage is introduced working in a bakery, shoveling baked goods into an oven. Clad in a filthy, sweat-stained undershirt and black pants, perspiration coating every sinewy muscle, he is pure sex, pure intensity, all raw, unhinged masculinity and demented swagger. In his radiant youth, Cage was a profoundly physical actor. He makes an indelible impression even before he begins speaking playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley’s beautiful dialogue.
With a decidedly Brandoesque combination of brawny, raw masculine sexuality and delicate, feminine sensitivity, Cage responds to Loretta’s presence in his bakery with a speech as raw and demented as it is unexpectedly lyrical, seething, “What is life? They say BREAD is life and I bake BREAD, BREAD, BREAD, and I sweat, and I shovel this stinking dough in and out of this hot hole in the wall and I should be SO happy, huh, sweetie? You want me to come to the wedding of my brother Johnny? Where’s my wedding? Chrissy? Over by the wall, bring me the big knife! Bring me the big knife! I’m gonna cut my throat! No, I want you to see this. I want you to watch me kill myself so you can tell my brother Johnny on his wedding day, okay! Chrissy, BRING ME THE BIG KNIFE! Do you know about me? Do you know about me? Okay, nothing is anybody’s fault but things happen. Look (pulls off glove to reveal a wooden hand) This wood is fake. Five years ago I was engaged to be married and Johnny came in here and he ordered bread from me and I said, ‘okay, some bread’, and I put my hand in the slicer and it got caught cause I wasn’t paying attention. The slicer chewed off my hand and it’s funny because when my fiancé found out about it, when she found out that I’d been maimed, she left me for another man.”
When Loretta protests, as any halfway sane human being would, that the accident and everything that came after it was not Johnny’s fault, it only serves to make Ronny angrier and less sane. “I don’t care! I ain’t no frickin’ monument to justice! I LOST MY HAND! I LOST MY BRIDE! JOHNNY HAS HIS HAND! JOHNNY HAS HIS BRIDE! YOU WANT ME TO TAKE MY HEARTBREAK, PUT IT AWAY AND FORGET!?! Is it just a matter of time before a man opens his eyes and gives up his one dream, his one dream of happiness. Maybe? Maybe.”
When the Chrissy Ronny earlier implored to bring him a large knife suitable for cutting his own throat with tells Loretta of her co-worker, “This is the most tormented man I have ever known!” It feels exquisitely redundant. This is clearly the most tormented man in the history of the universe.
As that speech undoubtedly conveys, playwright turned screenwriter John Patrick Shanley does not write naturalistic dialogue. He doesn’t make movies where people talk the way they do in real life. Instead, he writes plays and screenplays where people talk like poets, and playwrights, and madmen.
In Cage’s mouth, Shanley’s words are poetry. They’re jazz. They’re a lunatic’s howl of rage towards a half-mad and half-deaf God.
Everyone in Moonstruck is a little nuts. How could they not be? To be human is to be a little off but Ronny is a raging, riveting hurricane of crazy. Loretta should be repulsed by Ronny. Nothing he says or does is rational or sane or right. Within moments of meeting his brother’s wife-to-be, he is very dramatically, performatively threatening to commit suicide. He holds his brother single-handedly responsible for ruining his life and destroying his only chance for happiness by committing the apparently unforgivable crime of visiting his brother’s business and ordering bread.
Loretta is understandably a little taken aback by Ronny’s unhinged aria of deranged self-pity but she’s also intrigued because Cage makes brooding resentment and untreated mental illness sexy and strangely irresistible.
Ronny’s operatic display of bitterness should send Loretta running. Instead she quickly falls into a powerful state of lust with a poet-savage who is everything her lovely but milquetoast fiancé is not: lusty, passionate, overflowing with life and anger and lost and wild desire.
It’s difficult bordering on impossible for glamorous superstars who have loomed large in the public imagination for decades as sex bombs, movie stars and pop icons to play ordinarily people but Cher pulls off that neat trick here. The streak of grey in her famously jet-black mane helps; it makes her seem more ordinary and relatable. Consequently when our heroine gets her hair dyed black for her big opera date with Ronny, it feels like a superhero putting on their costume for the first time. THIS is the Cher we all know, an ageless Italian-American goddess who knows exactly what she wants and goes for it, regardless of the consequences.
Loretta and Ronny begin a passionate affair while her fiancé and his brother is attending to family business a world away. Most films would judge Loretta harshly for cheating on a profoundly nice man with his lunatic younger brother. Not Moonstruck. Norman Jewison’s surprise blockbuster is full of characters who are unfaithful and unhinged and unfair and sleeping with the wrong person and it does not judge anyone or anything. It is a film of radical acceptance that does not just accept all of its characters and their messiness and raw humanity; it loves them for it.
Loretta’s scandalous affair is contrasted with the equally complicated love lives of her parents, her philandering father Cosmo (the great Vincent Gardenia, in an Oscar-nominated turn) and mother Rose (Olympia Dukkakis in an Oscar winning performance), a housewife who strikes up a flirtation with Perry (John Mahoney), a professor with an eye for the ladies and a predilection towards sleeping with his students.
I come to Moonstruck backwards. Critics and audiences were, for the most part, blown away by John Patrick Shanley’s Oscar-nominated screenplay for Moonstruck and disappointed by his critically derided directorial debut, Joe Versus the Volcano.
I had the opposite response. I am something of a Joe Versus the Volcano super-fan. I love that movie and could live in its world forever but until this re-watch I hadn’t seen, or even particularly thought about Moonstruck in decades. So I was delighted to discover that Moonstruck is every bit as good as Joe Versus the Volcano and possibly even better. I was even happier to see that Moonstruck unsurprisingly shares a sensibility with Joe Versus the Volcano and many of its strengths as well, like a love of language and words and a core of unabashed romanticism.
Moonstruck is the rare romantic comedy that is legitimately romantic. But it’s more than that. It’s swooningly romantic. It’s wildly romantic. At the risk of hyperbole it is the most romantic movie of all time, with the possible exception of In the Mood for Love.
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
And of course you CAN and should procure a copy of the Weird Accordion to Al over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author-ebook/dp/B083QSSG6G/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=weird+accordion+to+al&qid=1585686867&sr=8-2
And we sure would dig it if you would consider pledging to Travolta/Cage and joining the neat community there at https://www.patreon.com/TravoltaCage and listening to the podcast, with special guest Karina Longworth on our big Two of a Kind/Moonstrcuk episode