MOONSTRUCK
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE:
What a beautiful thing it is to be in love. And what a royal pain in the ass. MOONSTRUCK knows this, and is entertaining all the more because it is a slyly knowing romantic comedy, a wicked one, even. It knows about love -- why we fall in love, why we resist love, and why we make ourselves into complete fricking idiots over love. Mostly the last bit.
Cher (who is great in this) stars as a woman who has already loved and lost; she's in her thirties, and that's enough time, apparently, for her to have been married and widowed. Has her heart been scarred for life? Maybe. She meets and gets engaged to a fellow named Johnny Cammareri (the always-enjoyable Danny Aiello), but the whole thing has the flavor of an afterthought. Then she bumps into Johnny's bitter and distant brother, played by Nicholas Cage, and lightning strikes.
She's not the only one. Her mother (Olympia Dukakis) meets up with Perry (John Mahoney), a professor who's been pulling the female-students-find-mature-intelligent-men-sooo-sexy routine for a little too long, and he finds himself drawn to this woman who's competely against "type" for him. Opposites attracting, and all that. Cher's father (hilariously played by Vincent Gardenia) is also a moon-eyed romantic in his own way -- and his way happens to be played out via adultery, with a woman so dry and cynical, it's like he had an affair to have another woman to kvetch with.
The movie works by combining clockwork plotting with careful and intelligent pieces of human comedy. One of the best scenes in the movie has Cage's character unveiling the source of his bitterness: his brother caused him to accidentally lose a hand in a bread slicer (he now has a wooden replacement), and now he's submerged himself in bread-baking almost as a kind of pathological self-penitence. "Bread, bread, bread," he shouts, throwing loaves from one end of the room to the other, "the 'staff of life'. For everyone except me." Cher is uncompromising: "You think you're the only one who ever shed a tear?" She doesn't know it yet, and neither does he, but the fact that the two of them can be so confrontational with each other is the key to them being happy together.
What's best about the movie is the total feeling of the package -- it's a date movie, to be sure, one that pairs up all the right couples in the end and leaves you smiling. What's even better is that the smiles it earns from you are endearing and real. A common cliche about reviewing a movie like this is "See it with someone you love", and in this case I can't escape making a recommendation like that.
Three and a half out of four moons like a big-a pizza pie... that's amore!
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