I watched the 1987 movie Moonstruck, just a few days ago, in 2001. I was 39 when I first saw it, and I now think I missed something profoundly important, probably because I had to be 50-something to really see it.
In one scene, Raymond and Rita Cappomaggi — both in their 50s, married forever, they keep a store together — are arguing about something trivial, the standard bickering so typical of middle-aged couples, when he suddenly stops, and looks at her intently.
“What is it?” she asks.
“I just saw you looking exactly like you did when I first fell in love with you,” he answers (or something like that — I’m paraphrasing). She smiles the smile of a blushing 15-year-old girl.
And we the audience see it in her, the way she looked once thirty years older, and that it is still she. It’s magical how that moment, for Raymond and Rita, makes other moments come alive, dissolves the break between present and past. Love is still there, and it is a suddenly-morphed love that preserves the foundations of knock-down, drag-out youthful infatuation, but builds it on the solid foundation of time, reality, making it work.
This is not the typical starstruck young lovers. These people are middle aged. That’s unusual in movies.
The movie of course revolves around the blistering-hot love affair between Loretta (Cher) and Ronnie (Nicholas Cage). Movie romances need beautiful people. Even so, it still has its unusual angles: Loretta is supposed to marry Ronnie’s brother Johnny, but more out of 30-something fatigue than love, until she meets the brother, Ronnie. With Ronnie she has the kind of love we’re used to in movies, the young and the beautiful, but even with that subplot the movie has something special to say about love. Ronnie tells Loretta:
“Loretta, I love you,” he pleads. “Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but 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.”
This movie, however, doesn’t settle for just that — which would be good enough — because it connects that kind of “beautiful young people in love” with the long-term love that (we hope, we assume) it creates. Near the conclusion, Raymond sits in the kitchen with his wife Rita, his sister Rose (Loretta’s mother), and his brother-in-law Cosmo, Loretta’s father, Rose’s husband. He remembers a moonlit scene 30 years earlier, when Cosmo stood outside the family home, bathed in moonlight and bathed in magic. The connection between then and now is made. Rose looks at her husband Cosmo, and as she does she sees both the bumpy and ill-shaped old fart in front of her plus the romantic suitor who was lit by moonlight many years earlier. She’s angry at him, struggling with him, struggling with life, but she pauses, looks him in the eye, and says “T’ Amo.” I love you. He’s caught off guard, focuses, and answers back: “T’ Amo.” They both mean it.
That’s true love. It’s solid, like granite, with magic sprinkled over it, like moonlight.
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