"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."
Ronny (Nicolas Cage)
Love triangles are, by their nature, complicated.
They become more complicated when all the parties are friends — and even more complicated when some are related. Most of the time, I suppose some of the parties are related by marriage, but sometimes they are related by blood.
Norman Jewison's "Moonstruck," which premiered in New York on this day in 1987, had both — well, kinda. There were several romances going on, and sometimes they overlapped. And all that got complicated, too.
The primary love story in "Moonstruck" involved a widow named Loretta (Cher), her boneheaded fiancé Johnny (Danny Aiello) and Johnny's brother (Nicolas Cage).
I liked a description that film critic Roger Ebert wrote several years ago. The story, Ebert wrote, "exists in a Brooklyn that has never existed, a Brooklyn where the full moon makes the night like day and drives people crazy with amore, when the moon–a hits their eyes like a big–a pizza pie. The soundtrack is equal parts 'La Boheme' and Dean Martin, and Ronny Cammareri's feelings are like those of an operatic hero, larger than life and more dramatic, as when he tells Loretta why he hates his brother Johnny."
So there's that.
Johnny proposed to Loretta before departing for Sicily to be with his dying mother. Loretta accepted the proposal but said she wanted to be sure they followed tradition. It was her failure to do so the first time, she believed, that put the curse on her first marriage, leading to her first husband's death. Following tradition was OK with Johnny, and he told Loretta to be sure Ronny was invited to the wedding.
Loretta did not love Johnny; convinced that she was unlucky in love, Loretta was content to marry him even though she did not love him, but everything changed when she met Ronny.
Life can be funny that way, you know?
Further complicating things were a couple of extramarital affairs in Loretta's own family.
Her father (Vincent Gardenia) was having an affair and so was her mother (Olympia Dukakis).
Cher and Dukakis took home Oscars for their performances. Jewison was nominated for Best Director, and Gardenia was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. And the movie was nominated for Best Picture.
