Norman Jewison’s ‘Moonstruck’ Remains An Incandescent Miracle That’s Positively Bursting With Life

Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck is a miracle, animated by the same transcendentally incandescent romantic nonsequiturs that you’d find in Ernst Lubitsch films, and buoyed by indescribable, ineffable joy. It’s magic. Every moment of it is bursting with passion, with the glorious mystery of being at last fully, truly alive. I’ve liked a lot of Jewison’s diverse filmography: the romantic triphammer of the original Thomas Crown Affair; Topol’s ageless Fiddler on the Roof, even his James Caan gladiatorial dystopia Rollerball, but it’s in the alchemy between Jewison’s obvious technical skill and unexpected lack of pretense married to playwright John Patrick Shanley’s gift for surgically-precise dialogue and characterization that something truly numinous emerged. Describe being in love, if you can. Moonstruck won Oscars for Cher (Best Actress), Olympia Dukakis (Best Supporting Actress), and for Shanley (Best Screenplay). Jewison deserved it, too, but it was The Last Emperor’s year and, besides, Jewison’s directorial touch here is so light it’s the movie equivalent of a Fred Astaire number. He made it look easy and like Cary Grant, like Alfred Hitchcock, “easy” is seldom rewarded with awards like these. He made it look easy, but no one has been able to do it again since.

Loretta (Cher) is a bookkeeper, a widow who lives with her parents Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose (Dukakis), who agrees one night, out of loneliness and lowered expectations, to marry well-meaning, boring, predictable Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). “Do you love him?” her mother asks. “No,” Loretta says. “Oh good. When you love them, they drive you crazy.” Johnny is called back to Palermo to sit at the bedside of his dying mother and begs Loretta to call his estranged brother Ronny (Nicolas Cage) and invite him to the wedding. Ronny refuses her call so she visits him at his job baking bread in a subterranean furnace for a neighborhood bodega. They fall in love: sweet Loretta with his tempestuousness and unpredictability; haggard Ronny with her essential decency and longing. Venus meets her Vulcan. The first night they spend together, a “supermoon” rises and ignites, and reignites, romances new and a few long thought dead. Loretta regrets her dalliance and Ronny asks for one last night together, not in embrace, but at the opera. “I love two things,” he says, “you and the opera.” It’s Puccini’s La bohéme and during “Quando m’en vo,” Jewison shows Ronny taking Loretta’s hand when Ronny notices her eyes shining at the tragedy of star-crossed lovers, doomed to a few brief encounters and then tragedy and oblivion. I remember the first time I held my wife’s hand during a movie and I don’t remember anything about the movie after it. Moonstruck showed me what being in love was like ten years before I met the woman I will love for the rest of my life.

It’s witchcraft, a profound vision powered by dream logic in Director of Photography David Watkin’s sparkling shoebox diorama of Brooklyn. I was obsessed with this film when I was fifteen in the same way I was obsessed with David Cronenberg’s The Fly from the year before: both pictures seemed to me to address the riddle of love; of what it might be like to meet someone one day who will love you even as you wither, fail, inevitably fall apart. I am horribly imperfect and deformed by my self-loathing. How could there be someone who could see me beneath all of that? Moonstruck promised me someone could. Ronny delivers a perfect monologue towards the end of the picture as his last gambit to win Loretta. He says, as a light snow begins to fall and a tenor slides through the soundtrack:

Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit. 

I used to cut this into the mixtapes I made for girls I liked and wanted to impress. Its emotions are enormous, unashamed, embarrassing… operatic. The sweep of Moonstruck can be charted along the same extravagant arcs of driving home after the first date with a person who you seem to have known forever that you met just that night. That person you never knew before but will look for everyday now until you die, whether or not you end up together. “Do you love him, Loretta,” her mother asks. “Ma, I love him awful,” Loretta says. “Oh God, that’s too bad.” Shanley’s script is as good as Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise about dueling thieves who fall in love over their petty larcenies; as the complex menage-a-trois of Design for Living; or a prim Don Ameche trying to convince an infernal Laird Cregar that he should be admitted into Hell in Heaven Can Wait. It’s at once featherlight and dense, an impossible confection, matched step for mellifluous step by Jewison who augments, decorates, adores Shanley’s words with his shots of limitless nights, the moon in its cradle, and the details we only notice when we want to savor every detail. 

Jewison leaves a broad legacy: the landmark Civil Rights film In the Heat of the Night, the still-shocking Agnes of God, and one of the great comedies of the 1960s The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming – but when I heard of Jewison’s death this week at the age of 97, the first thing I thought of was Rose telling her philandering husband “I just want you to know, no matter what you do you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.” I thought, too, of how Moonstruck is one of those bolts of lightning that hits you a few times in a life spent watching movies. It’s a shot of adrenaline, of endorphins, of nostalgia for every single time you went careening out of control and you liked it. Ronny says:

Everything seems like nothing to me now, ’cause I want you in my bed. I don’t care if I burn in hell. I don’t care if you burn in hell. The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they’re nothing. I see they ain’t here. The only thing that’s here is you – and me.

Moonstruck is evergreen. We watch it, my wife and I, every year on our anniversary and it never fails to make us cry. Not because it’s a sad movie, but rather because it’s one of the happiest movies I’ve ever seen. What a thing to leave behind. What an extraordinary act of generosity. What a monument to how you were here and so incredibly, defiantly, jubilantly alive.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.