‘Moonstruck’ is the Perfect Dish
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Vicki Rakowski
Have you ever had a dish of mind-bendingly perfect pasta? In this dish, the noodles are cooked to absolute perfection with a mere touch of bite. The sauce tastes like it simmered for 48 hours. The vegetables have an edge of crispness, but they melt into buttery nothingness as you chew them. If there’s meat, it’s meltingly tender. The salt and acid are perfect, just enough to make all of the ingredients taste more like themselves without overwhelming the dish.
When you ask about the recipe, you assume there are about two-dozen ingredients, but are astonished to learn that it’s pretty much pasta, tomatoes, a vegetable, a wee bit of meat, and salt. The dish tastes the way it does because the perfect ingredients were perfectly treated and perfectly served.
That is the experience of watching Moonstruck. Perfect actors, perfect script, perfect setting, perfect emotion. After you watch the movie, you can’t help but look back and think, what was in that recipe?
Stepping Back Into Desire
Loretta Castorini is a 37-year-old widowed bookkeeper who lives with her parents and paternal grandfather (and his five mutts, to whom he croons in loving Italian) in their gigantic brownstone in Brooklyn. When her boyfriend Johnny Cammerari, a middle-aged mama’s boy, proposes, she accepts.
After all, her first husband, who she married for love, has been dead for the better part of a decade. The story Loretta (and her family) has told again and again is: she’s got no luck. This marriage to Johnny should be easy. After all, he’s a sweet man who she doesn’t love. Easy.
This plan is a good one until Johnny goes out of town to see his dying mother, and asks Loretta to go and make peace with his estranged younger brother, Ronnie. This unleashes a chain of events that more or less leads to both Loretta and Ronnie waking up from a deep slumber.
We see the heartbreaking and charming love lives of Loretta’s family. We see her step back into desire and need once more. We see music, art, romance, all while a colossally full golden moon hangs above Brooklyn, enchanting them all into mischief and love.
This movie encapsulates a perfectly told little world that was running along just fine until a series of simple events tilt that world on its axis, setting it on a new rotation, all while the moon watches and winks.
Plainly Perfect Ingredients
While the script sometimes feels spare, the richly painted story invites you to connect the dots on your own:
The quirks and superstitions of the Old World that have followed the family from Italy to New York.
Loretta’s rigidity and how it falls away as she opens up as reluctantly as a rare bloom, finally flowering again after so many years.
The sweet, plaintive melody of “Musetta’s Waltz” from Puccini’s La Boehm threading through the moonlit scenes set in simple bedrooms, cold winter streets, old-fashioned candlelit restaurants.
These things all stand out so boldly and plainly in this story—perfect ingredients treated perfectly.
Find a movie that is as perfect. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
“This movie encapsulates a perfectly told little world that was running along just fine until a series of simple events tilt that world on its axis, setting it on a new rotation, all while the moon watches and winks. ”
Moonstruck in the Middle
I’m a few years older than Loretta Castorini now, firmly entering middle-age. These days I find I am hungry for art that addresses the weltschmerz of being in the middle of your life. It has been so easy to unwittingly relinquish the poetry and beautiful ache of youth.
Even though I wouldn’t do it over again, the main thing I would tell my younger self is: you have much less to fear than you think you do. Go forth and conquer.
Here in the middle, I have no idea what advice would be useful to my current self. And that is when I look to art. I have loved Moonstruck for about two decades now, and it has meant something different to me as I’ve rolled along through life.
These days, this film gently prods me into remembering that there is romance and charm all around me all the time. As I approach an official handful of decades on earth, I think this is my job: take ingredients and turn them into something beautiful. Remember that the universe has its own jokes and mysteries and I need to remember to look for them, even as I do boring middle-aged things like pay the mortgage and replace the filters in the humidifiers.
When I was younger, romance was a destination to be reached. Now I find it’s something to be noticed, appreciated, and savored. Not unlike being surprised by a perfect dish.
Vicki Rakowski is an enthusiastic consumer of all things art and literature, and a library director in the Chicagoland area.