Everything Is Temporary

You need to believe that things can change. And hopefully they will. There’s a framed picture of my father nearby on a bookshelf that I look at often which shows him in front of a poster for MOONSTRUCK that he had hanging on a wall. Beyond simply knowing that he always liked the film, I never asked him about this. I might not have gotten much of an answer anyway, but it always seemed clear that it was a favorite and maybe he identified with it as a comedy about Italians who lived in New York, maybe one that didn’t feature Italians who lived in New York involved in organized crime. But I’ll never be able to have this conversation with him. The point is that because of this my father comes to mind every time I see MOONSTRUCK, thinking about the happy ending that he didn’t get to have. But I remember my father. I remember the good things and the bad. And I know that things can change, things I wish I could share with him now.

But you never get all the answers, especially when it comes to questions you have about your parents. Some of those are likely things you wouldn’t want to know anyway. But my father did love MOONSTRUCK which is a wonderful film, one of the very best romantic comedies but it feels like so much more than that containing a beautiful screenplay by John Patrick Shanley that finds so much life in every single line of dialogue along with direction by Norman Jewison that feels close to miraculous in getting the tone it’s going for absolutely right. MOONSTRUCK makes me think of the past. It makes me think of my family, just as it makes me think about any possible connections that I may have to those family members who fell out of my life long ago but something of that is still inside of me, some feeling of passion and trying to understand what all this is about. It’s a film about realizing that the answers you may never find don’t matter. What matters is accepting all the absurdities in life and embracing them, particularly when it results in a form of love that you never saw coming, knowing all the madness will never be fully understood anyway. The answers you do find are there and they matter to you.

Loretta Castorini (Cher), a Brooklyn woman in her late thirties who lives with her parents in the family brownstone is proposed to by boyfriend Johnny Cammerini (Danny Aiello) right before he gets on a plane to Sicily where his beloved mother is dying. He asks Loretta to invite his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage), who he has not spoken to in five years, to the wedding. At home she informs her parents, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose (Olympia Dukakis), of the engagement while assuring her mother that she likes, but doesn’t love, him so there is no chance of her getting hurt. The next day she goes to find Ronny at his bakery and learns about his hatred for his brother, going back to the accident that caused Ronny to lose his hand in a bread slicer which led to losing the woman he was going to marry. After going up to his apartment to talk things out, Ronny soon kisses Loretta and takes her to his bed. The next day, Ronny promises he will never bother her again if she agrees to accompany him to an opera at the Met that night which she agrees to, but she can’t keep ignoring what is really happening between the two of them. And as Cosmo is sneaking around with another woman, Rose has her own encounter with an NYU professor (John Mahoney) that helps her understand the meaning of her marriage and what her husband is looking for.

Some years back after watching the film again I tweeted, “The last fifteen minutes of MOONSTRUCK take place in a kitchen.” This was meant to be a simple observation of amazement at how beautifully those fifteen minutes leading to the end worked, the film not needing to go anywhere else to tell the story while still feeling fully, richly cinematic but some seemed to think that I was jokingly slamming the film for doing this. Let me state for the record that I wasn’t in the slightest. Because MOONSTRUCK feels pretty close to perfect in how it takes such a simple story based on simple feelings with such a long stretch of the film set in a simple place like a kitchen and infuses it all with this feeling of full-fledged opera with all the complications that comes with it, while making each and every single line of dialogue both distinctive and sometimes so perfectly funny you can’t imagine that character saying anything else. The film is about love as well as how that love gets into us and infects us in the best way possible, making us want to cherish every second of that completely unexpected feeling.

There’s a sense of fate to it all, felt right from the start, through the opening credits that foreshadow the night at the Met to come, right up to the cheeky director’s credit over a body in a funeral parlor. MOONSTRUCK is tightly plotted yet it still finds a way to luxuriate in every single scene in its 102 minute running time no matter how brief, almost as if the plot doesn’t really matter when compared to all those emotions but of course it does, which adds to the overall effect while defying simple description on a rational level. And all this makes it feel completely glorious. Watching the film has always been enjoyable to me but it also somehow feels designed to mean more as time goes on and our hearts become more open to the mysteries that it delves into. Maybe at this point in my life I’m a little like Vincent Gardenia’s Cosmo myself, sitting up late at night listening to my own version of Vicki Carr records and wondering if I can find a way to evade death for as long as possible. But I also find myself understanding how it feels to be affected by the beauty of the moon, thinking that everything in life was already set but then something comes along to make it all so different, realizing how much love there is to find in it. The plot kicks off when the uptight Johnny proposes to Loretta, getting down on his knees in that Italian restaurant where she advised him against ordering the fish, but it also happens because of the moon and the feeling its appearance puts in the air when she goes to find Ronny at his bakery, in ways that can’t be rationally explained. It’s a plot that can’t rationally be explained but those sort of passional emotions and feelings are often so irrational anyway, so it all makes total sense.

The way that plot unfurls feels simple yet as complex as trying to understand all those distant memories where you’re not sure why your parents behaved as they did, the caring they had for you mixed up with all those very adult emotions you know they had but wouldn’t share. Loretta has no expectations of love, not since her first husband was hit by a bus as she so flatly puts it in a way that can’t help but be somehow funny in its deadpan way. The only expectations Ronny has is of his own ferocious anger, becoming greater with every loaf of bread that he bakes in that basement, the way Cage is introduced without seeing his face as if he were a mystical beast. All that it takes is for them to meet. The film is filled with moments that barely seem like they should fit yet they all do, character moments from people we never see again yet in those few seconds they reveal all the joy and pain in their hearts, the couple in the liquor store arguing over whether the husband is a wolf, the way Vincent Gardenia sells the couple on the glory of copper pipes in their home or the way the bakery employee played by Nada Despotovich gets a moment to talk about how much she loves Ronny but it’s something that he’ll never know. The way Olympia Dukakis opens her eyes and immediately asks, “Who’s dead?” speaks volumes, an awareness that no good news ever comes late at night. Even the way the waiters fret about Johnny getting down on one knee because he’ll ruin his suit. It all unfolds like a fable you’ve never heard yet it all seems inevitable. The coming together of Loretta and Ronny happens before you think it will, but the film doesn’t waste any time just as it doesn’t waste any time getting to the sight of that giant moon which gets everyone including the dogs in that mood, as if Ronny sees no point in wasting any time. As far as he’s concerned, by this point in their lives they’ve wasted enough time already.

But through all of that, there’s one particular moment in the dialogue stays with me. Well, many moments do in a film where every single line is just right, all the dialogue exacting yet flowing beautifully. But there’s that one line where Louis Guss, delightful as Rose’s brother Raymond (his wife Rita is charmingly played by Julie Bovasso who also served as the film's dialogue coach helping with the Brooklyn accents; Guss is also the one in THE GODFATHER who said, “I don’t want it near schools, I don’t want it sold to children, that’s an infamia.”), says to Cosmo over dinner, “I never told you this, because it’s not really a story…” when recounting his tale of seeing the moon long ago and the inflection in his voice as he recounts this very personal memory hits just the right chord for me. We all live in our lives, keeping our own secrets that aren’t really stories, those nights we need to forget and remember way too often, thinking it’s all set dealing with the scars that we have and how we can’t get past the hurt they caused. The old woman putting a curse on the plane becoming a reminder of siblings holding things back from each other just like Johnny and Ronny. But Loretta doesn’t believe in curses. She does believe in luck based on what happened with her first marriage but is still a sensible person, sensible in her work and what she wants to spend money on, even the depiction of passion she expects from a proposal is totally steeped in pragmatism. Which, of course, is the opposite of passion, but that’s what she wants, content with her grey hair until the time comes to turn it full on black to make her appropriately stunning for that night at the opera, a true Cinderella transformed by the moon. She even admits that she doesn’t get the opera at first when they go to see “La Bohème” but it’s the pure sense of intense emotion that gets to her and finally makes her open to what Ronny has to say when they’re out there shivering cold on the street.

Writing about all of this is like attempting to find a rationale in that madness, as impossible as trying to put that real feeling of love felt between two people into words that make sense. But simply put, every moment of MOONSTRUCK feels beautiful to me. Every shot is something I want to live in. I want to eat all the food, I want to walk down the street wearing a big winter coat to protect me against the cold like the one I had way back then in New York, it makes me want to go to the opera at the Met for the first time in my life. And in Norman Jewison, a director who I always respected due to his general body of work more than ever felt any sort of passion for, it’s a perfect fit. He understood the absurdity and how all that makes it even more human. He’s not Italian, but he gets the heightened feeling of the story mixed in with the operatic feel that comes out of it which is so necessary, the cold felt in the New York street is always tangible and never turns those feelings into a joke. And the way Jewison makes use of the space in the house is also memorable, giving it such a lived in and genuine feel to see how the characters interact with each other in a place that really does feel like their home. From the outside, the NYU professor is awed by it, exclaiming, “It’s a mansion!”. Rose’s response of “It’s a house,” is the perfect reply for a place she knows as well as anything and from the inside it’s the place to live where the family makes the most sense. And the visuals from cinematographer David Watkin add to the magic with the close-up of Cher’s face with a single tear going down during the opera seeming otherworldly and more hauntingly beautiful than she ever looked in any other film. You have to accept certain things in life, something which John Mahoney’s NYU professor has never been able to do and never been able to grow up, old as he already is and seemingly playing the same scene with a student in that restaurant presumably over and over, always knowing that the same end is going to happen once again. And it’s in Ronny’s big speech played with every ounce of fire by Cage in the freezing cold where he convinces Loretta of his love as if without ever knowing it, he was waiting all along for her to appear before him in that basement. Bookended by Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore”, it’s a film that loves all these people, loves all the food, loves every place where it’s set, loves life, loves love as much as it knows how absurd all these things are. Without the absurdity, that love wouldn’t be there.

The way the film pauses in the early morning light for Loretta taking what has become that iconic walk down the middle of the street kicking a can and still in the glow of the previous evening, a moment of reverie that becomes the perfect way to lead into the scene where the entire family comes together, like it or not. And in those fifteen minutes at the end, set in that kitchen with oatmeal being served and the whole family turning up in a way that feels completely ridiculous yet totally natural, so the ending needs to take place there in this room that says family more than any other. That passion needs to be felt for the right reasons. You can’t create this. You can’t force that feeling into being out of nowhere. We are here to ruin ourselves in search of joy, as Ronny says. Part of that is the dream to somehow keep death away which can’t happen so, in a way, falling in true love is accepting the end. Accepting how fast all this is that we live. Accepting what that feeling can really be. The moon, which also made a key appearance in Shanley’s own JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO in a scene where Tom Hanks upon seeing how big it is expresses profound thanks for his life (not long ago I found myself rewatching that entire film just for this scene), is the sign for this. Our dreams are in there. Our regrets are in there. The ability to find beauty in it and make our lives better from that is what’s found in there. We think we know what our lives should be. But then things happen. And it’s like those who came before are laughing at us. They know how absurd we are. They know how ridiculous that pain can be. And they know that what’s happening is always what was meant to be. Maybe someday we’ll know it too. As Cosmo correctly says to Loretta, everything is temporary.

Any shot of Cher in this film feels like a miracle as well. Whatever else you want to say, this is a Cher performance, like her work in Mike Nichols’ SILKWOOD and Peter Bogdanovich’s MASK, where there’s not a trace of what we think of as Cher in her Oscar-winning performance and this feels vulnerable in a way that the others really aren’t. There are silent moments that she has, just watching the way she responds to others, which might have been as responsible for her Oscar win as much as anything, but through each screwy line of dialogue she takes this character and infuses it with every ounce of level-headedness, confusion and joy, turning it into something unforgettable. Playing against her, Nicolas Cage takes the automatic madness coming from his screen presence, and makes it feel completely right in this New York world, confronting the heightened dialogue in a way that takes each word spoken to its full potential, but he also transforms the lines with every ounce of fire in his big speech reaches to the height of that operatic feel. Just looking at his eyes when he gives Cher a certain look while inviting her to come inside with him, he doesn’t need to do anything else. All that passion is there, Cage correctly hits the ceiling with it, and yet the happily calm way he says “I would love some oatmeal” to Rose near the end in a way that says he’s not moving from this room might be my favorite moment of his in the whole film. Vincent Gardenia, Oscar-nominated, is also a joy and the way he uses his fingers in service to the grand points he needs to make in his arguments becomes a true marvel. Olympia Dukakis, Oscar winner, plays so much in just her looks at people and the way she drills in with her best lines to cut someone down has a power to it, the laugh that comes out of the moment unavoidable while feeling totally clear how much she means what she says. In his few scenes, John Mahoney cannily takes the surface level of charm coming off his NYU professor to use his smile in a way that doesn’t quite mask the character’s lack of understanding what he’s missing out on while the way Danny Aiello speaks the line, “I’m calling from the deathbed of my mother” on the phone call to Loretta somehow becomes one of the funniest things ever spoken in a movie. Also memorable is Fiodor Chaliapin as Cosmo’s father for the way he handles all those dogs as well as how he spits out the lines that he has with defiance, especially at the end when he tearfully declares, “I’m confused.”

As of this writing, I’m approaching the third anniversary of the night my mother died. It was late Thanksgiving night. And, of course, since the date when it happened and the actual holiday don’t always match up this means that most years it’ll feel like there are two days to mark the anniversary. Leave it to my mother to pull off that neat trick. Less than six months later, I met the woman who I plan to spend the rest of my life with. And right now, it feels like something that was always meant to be. Maybe I’ll even propose to her in a nice Italian restaurant, or at least maybe Musso’s. And hopefully that’s what sometimes happens in life. After all, if you’ve never collapsed sobbing on the sidewalk over someone you’ve been in love with, then what’s the point of any of it? If you’ve never been wracked with guilt over something involving your parents long after they’re gone, are you even human? Maybe it’s even possible that you’ll find your way out the other side of that darkness to a form of happiness you never imagined. Released at Christmas 1987, MOONSTRUCK is one of the films from that year which could likely be called perfect, up there with the likes of ROBOCOP and BROADCAST NEWS which put together could make for a good triple bill. They’re not only the funniest films of that year but they understand so much about the absurdity of it all, each in their own way. And so much of what happens to us is about just trying to figure out what it all means, the things MOONSTRUCK seems to know and understand. As for answers we’ll never get, maybe my dad simply thought it was a funny film with enjoyable characters, nothing all that complicated. But I still suspect there was something more to it than that, something connected to his own memories of the past and where he came from. Maybe there’s a secret about something that he never told me. But if you look up at the moon and think about all the possibilities still to be found in that magic it suddenly all makes sense. The people who loved you and are no longer here will laugh with joy. For once, you know what they know. And maybe then you can live the rest of your life finally able to understand.