Moonstruck: Life in the In-Between

On the surface, the beginning of Moonstruck offers an example of what some call deglamming. Cher’s unusual and potent beauty is muted, and costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge places her in baggy, nondescript clothing to emphasize Loretta’s supposed dowdiness. What makes the performance work, what makes it so that you never think of it as a gimmick designed to win awards (as deglamming so often is), is the way that Cher’s natural star power shines through everything Loretta does. The character is simply waiting for someone to see her in the right way, so she can shed the ill-fitting costume she wears and become her glamorous self.

Shanley’s script also excels at inventing a place where this movie exists, obviously helped by his knowledge of working-class New York neighborhoods (he grew up in the Bronx). The Carroll Gardens that Loretta and her family live in feels as if it keeps doing its thing when no one is pointing a camera at it; it obeys peculiar rhythms of its own. From the bickering of a couple at the corner store to the  restaurant, the film gives every figure in the movie, no matter how small, a moment in which to shine. Even when Moonstruck delves into darker moments and emotions, it is an exceptionally generous and kind movie, in love with its characters.

Opera is a crucial touchstone for the film. Ronny might seem, initially, like a hotheaded brute, but his love of opera (seemingly his one pleasure until he meets Loretta) marks him as someone full of deep and abiding emotion. Likewise, the opera itself becomes a kind of window into another life for Loretta, who falls in love both with the art form and with Ronny seemingly at the same time. Jewison and Shanley structure the film to build to what amount to arias for every character. The dialogue is naturalistic, but in that old-Hollywood way, where everybody is just a bit cleverer than they might be in real life. (They always know just what to say in an argument, at least.) The film is endlessly quotable without ever feeling quippy, and even its most famous line—“Snap out of it!”—doesn’t play as screen dialogue so much as something one might really say when exasperated with a romantic partner whom one just can’t seem to quit. And every so often, the script bursts into song, as when Ronny tells Loretta that we are not here on this planet to be perfect, or when Rose’s brother (a character rather tangential to the film’s main story) retells the story of Cosmo’s courtship of Rose, all against the backdrop of Cosmo’s guilt over the extramarital affair he is having.

Dukakis’s and Gardenia’s roles as Loretta’s mother and father benefit considerably from this approach to character development. Both could have seemed like stereotypes of overbearingly concerned Italian American parents (again, look to My Big Fat Greek Wedding), but Jewison and Shanley temper their concern not just with empathy but also with hesitation. In Loretta, both Cosmo and Rose see a reflection of who they were and who they might have been. And because Shanley’s script gives Cosmo an affair of his own (which Loretta finds out about) and Rose an opportunity for an affair of her own, it examines multiple ways in which commitment can function and promises be broken, underscoring just how much Loretta’s actions may hurt Johnny whenever he returns home from Sicily (the main tension hanging over the film). The final scene, which brings all these conflicts crashing into one another and pays off nearly every single strand of the film, is a masterpiece of screenwriting, even as it perhaps rushes too quickly toward a happy ending.

Or does it? My main complaint about Moonstruck has always involved how it last-minute-shrugs its way past the part where Johnny forgives Loretta and Ronny just moments after they’ve revealed the extent to which they’ve betrayed him. But every time I rewatch the film, a little older and a little more in tune with the ways life can blindside you with joy or despair in equal measure, I become more forgiving of this idea. Jewison ends the film on a photograph of two older people, presumably the long-ago immigrants who brought the Castorini name to New York in the first place, and the image serves as a thematic bookend to that image of the corpse his “Directed by” credit appears over. All of life is a transition between birth and death, and spending any amount of that time sore at someone you love is too many moments wasted on heartbreak. We hold within us the possibility of something new, if only we open ourselves up to it.

I realized, many years later, what my love of makeover sequences was all about. My own womanhood was waiting to be coaxed out of the shell I had hidden it within, a process I undertook via gender transition. Few makeover sequences still hold their power for me now, but the one in Moonstruck does, because it understands all the ways that changing into one’s own self is undertaken alone, and it understands all the power of first seeing who you really are in the mirror, long before anybody else can see you. Life is made up of binaries, sure, but it is also made up of all the spaces in between their oppositions. Moonstruck swings wildly between huge emotions, but it also understands that the gift of life, as long as we have it, is in its endless possibility, in its forgiveness of our many fumbling efforts to change.