When There's a Full Moon Over Brooklyn

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"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)

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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.

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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?

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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.

Was 'Silkwood' Snubbed?

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Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep): You think I contaminated myself? You think I did that?

Mace Hurley (Bruce McGill): I think you'd do just about anything to shut down this plant.

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"Silkwood," which was released in the theaters 30 years ago today, was a story about three ordinary — and flawed — people caught in an extraordinary situation at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma.

Meryl Streep played Karen Silkwood, a plant worker and a labor union activist. Her boyfriend Drew was played by Kurt Russell; he also worked at the plant. Cher (yes, that Cher) played Dolly, a lesbian and a roommate of Karen's and Drew's. Dolly worked at the plant as well.

The first part of the movie dealt with their day–to–day lives — Karen, for instance, was involved in a clash with her former common–law husband over time with their children. Drew and Dolly tried to be as supportive as possible. Working at the plant was a humdrum job, like any other humdrum job. The only real difference, as far as they were concerned, was that this job required workers to handle hazardous material, but the workers believed the risk was minimized, that they were protected by all the precautions their employers had taken.

But as the movie went on, it was established that the plant had taken on a large contract — and it had fallen behind. To make up for lost ground and lost time, the company was requiring employees to work long hours — and Karen, who had recently become active in the labor union, was convinced that the company was falsifying documents and cutting all kinds of corners, making conditions truly hazardous for the workers.

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In spite of the precautions that were in place, she and others had been contaminated during the course of their work. This was expected to a certain extent but not at either the rate or level they were seeing. That alone was suspicious, but Silkwood, in the course of her investigation, uncovered evidence of other abuses as well — so Silkwood became a whistleblower and agreed to meet a New York Times reporter with the evidence she had gathered. She never made the appointment. She died in a car accident. No documents were found with her body.

I thought that the acting was terrific, and I was pleased to learn that critic Roger Ebert felt the same way. "It's a little amazing," he wrote, "that established movie stars like Streep, Russell and Cher could disappear so completely into the everyday lives of these characters."

Amazing but true. Long before the end of the movie, I stopped being conscious of who the actors were and became aware only of who their characters were and the plight they faced.

Director Mike Nichols ("The Graduate") probably had his own ideas of why Silkwood died, and he didn't spare the company, but he left the door open for other conclusions as well. Nearly 40 years after Silkwood's death, much of it remains shrouded in mystery.

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Maybe the subject matter was a little too hot to handle for Oscar voters in those days. "Silkwood" got five Oscar nominations but zero wins.

"Silkwood" was just one of the movies for which Streep has earned an Academy Award nomination. Everyone knew how talented she was when "Silkwood" premiered. She had received four Oscar nominations already and had won two statuettes (but she wouldn't win another one until 2011).

Her co–star, Cher, also was nominated. It was her first, but she wouldn't win until she was nominated a second time.

Nichols' directing received a third Oscar nomination — and, for the second time, someone else took home the award.

"Silkwood" wasn't nominated for Best Picture, either. Was it snubbed? I don't know. I've seen "Terms of Endearment," the Best Picture winner 30 years ago, and I thought it was good.

It just wasn't as important as "Silkwood."

Faithless

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It's probably safe to say that, when Cher and Ryan O'Neal die, their appearances in the 1996 movie "Faithful" probably won't be mentioned in the lead paragraphs of their obituaries.

Neither, I'm sure, would object to that.

If Cher, for instance, is going to be remembered for her work in films, it almost certainly goes without saying that she would prefer that people remember her Oscar–winning performance in "Moonstruck" — or her parts in "Mask" or "Mermaids" or "The Witches of Eastwick" — and not her role as Maggie in "Faithful."

For that matter, O'Neal would surely prefer to be remembered for "Love Story" or "Paper Moon" — or even "What's Up, Doc?" — and not for playing Jack, Maggie's philandering husband who hires a hit man to kill her.

It was billed as a comedy, but, frankly, I found little amusing about it. Neither did audiences or critics, apparently.

The premise was that Maggie, on the occasion of her 20th anniversary, was depressed and seriously contemplating suicide. Meanwhile, Jack had hired this hit man to kill her, and the hit man kept his appointment.

But a funny thing (not "funny ... ha ha" but more like "funny ... strange") happened. The two started to bond while they waited for the all–clear signal from Jack.

(That's actually some sort of syndrome, I believe — in which a person who has been abducted forms an attachment to the abductor. If I remember correctly, it is what happened to newspaper heiress Patty Hearst when she was being held by the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 1970s.)

There was something else that was funny (again, not "funny ... ha ha" but more like "funny ... strange") about what unfolded.

Nobody cared.

Well, I didn't. I can't really speak for the others who saw it, but I can reach some conclusions — and one is that nobody cared. Literally. The film's opening weekend produced nearly half of its total gross revenue.

I didn't see it at the theater. I saw it years later on TV.

And I decided, as I watched it, that too many things just didn't add up. For instance, Cher and O'Neal were supposed to be playing a childless couple marking their 20th wedding anniversary. The childless thing was clearly a sore point between them, and most people would figure that, logically, they must be in their early to mid–40s in order for the failure to conceive to still be such an issue.

But they were about 10 years older than they needed to be. O'Neal turned 55 the weekend the film was released, and Cher was about to turn 50. Cher was well past her childbearing years, and O'Neal should have been over the disappointment of having no children.

If closeups hadn't betrayed those facts from time to time, the audience must have been influenced by its knowledge of just how long both had been in the public eye.

I know I was.

In 1996, Cher had been familiar to audiences for more than 30 years, going back to her 1965 hit with Sonny, "I Got You Babe." O'Neal's TV credits went back farther than that, but movie audiences had been aware of him for more than a quarter of a century — since 1970's "Love Story."

If the faces hadn't been so familiar, the story might have been more effective. But, as it was, I simply couldn't buy it.

For that matter, I couldn't work up much empathy for any of the characters, either. And, as I say, it appears I wasn't alone. Judging from the box office receipts, not many people paid to see it.

They didn't miss much.