Love can be a lot of crazy, and the word "lunatic" comes from "Luna", the Latin name for the Moon, so describing someone in love as "moonstruck" isn't much of a leap. Something as crazy as love is fertile ground for laughs, but a quick gander over the romantic-comedy section of your online video store is all you need to see that milking love for laughs isn't a sure thing. When it is though, you get MOONSTRUCK. Or some other really good romantic comedy, but this one's good enough.
Directed by Norman Jewison
Starring: Cher, Nicholas Cage, Olympia Dukakis, Vincent Gardenia, Danny Aiello, John Mahoney, Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Louis Guss, Julie Bovasso, Anita Gillette
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (contains sensuality and suggestive content, language and smoking).
One thing you can always count on to make a movie better, whether it's a bad movie being made a tiny bit tolerable or a marvelous garnish on an already excellent movie, is Italian accents. They just seem to make everything better. But MOONSTRUCK is already a very good movie. In some ways, it reminds of MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING, because it's a madcap ethnic romantic comedy with a middle-aged woman at the center getting a life-makeover when she's swept up in new love, but that's about where the similarities end. Anyway, MOONSTRUCK is a better, more sophisticated romantic comedy.
Pop star Cher, in the role that won her the Academy Award in her "E.G.O.T.", stars as Loretta Castorini, a widowed accountant living in Brooklyn with her Sicilian-American clan. She's just agreed to marry her boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello); a marriage that her mother, Rose (Olympia Dukakis), blesses as soon as she knows Loretta only "likes" him, not loves him. Johnny is suddenly called away to the bedside of his dying mother in Sicily, and he asks Loretta to find his estranged brother and invite him to the wedding. Johnny's younger brother Ronny is a greatly distressed baker who blames the incident that left him with a wooden arm on Johnny, and it isn't long after Loretta seeks him out that she violates her engagement to Johnny in Ronny's bed. Meanwhile, Loretta's mother Rose suspects that Loretta's father, Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia), a highly successful plumber, is being unfaithful to her, which prompts her to question why it is men cheat. Cosmo, in fact, is cheating on her with a simple-minded bimbo who he finds unsatisfactory, but is scared to lose. Also in the mix is a college professor (John Mahoney) who is regularly humiliated "drink-in-the-face" style by much younger dates and bonds with Rose over their experiences in love, and Rose's brother and his wife, Raymond and Rita (Louis Guss and Julie Bovasso, respectively), who have a reawakening in their sexual relationship. As each person goes about in their increasingly complicated romantic stories, their secrets and desires intertwine in a comic web of love and infidelity, inevitably coming to a head as everyone must come clean in their secrets and their loves.
It was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning for Best Actress (Cher), Best Supporting Actress (Olympia Dukakis) and Best Original Screenplay, but with all due respect to Bernardo Bertolucci's impressively mounted but dour biographical epic, THE LAST EMPEROR, it deserved to win Best Picture that year, too.
It's purely feel-good, flavorful romantic fun that makes you hungry for Italian food and a little love.
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