Dear Academy: Please Give Cher Another Oscar

Movies, ordinarily vehicles to transport us out of our quotidian existence, became in 2020 the means to escape from our new science-fiction reality. It might be the first time, ever, that the entertainment industry can justify the public broadcast of what is essentially a glitzy Employees of the Year ceremony: the Academy Awards. Since the spring, film stars have directly affected public health. Their fine work gave people a reason to stay inside for, collectively, billions of hours staring at the TV. To properly embrace their cinematic achievements, however, the Academy should acknowledge the unmooring from time that has become a fact of life this year: They should honor not only recent releases but all the movies that sustained us. If they did, Cher would surely be a favorite to win her second Oscar for her performance in 1987’s “Moonstruck.”

As stay-at-home orders began creeping inward from the coasts in March, people were drawn, with tidal force, to “Moonstruck.” Search data from Google Trends indicate interest in the film remained unusually robust throughout 2020, compared with the waxing and waning search cycles of previous years. In April, New York Magazine’s entertainment website, Vulture, anointed “Moonstruck” the “Morbid Spaghetti Rom-Com We All Need Right Now.” The movie trended on Twitter on a fluke Wednesday in June. By the time summer hit, the Criterion Collection was working to release a digitally restored edition of “Moonstruck” in time for the holidays. The impromptu collective return to “Moonstruck” felt a bit like the moments of happenstance the movie portrays so enchantingly; without relying on the explicitly supernatural, it conveys a feeling of magic, like sparks cast into winter darkness by a staticky blanket.

Here is what happens over the course of the four-day period depicted in the film: A 37-year-old widowed Brooklyn bookkeeper, Loretta Castorini (played by Cher), accepts a proposal of marriage from her unexceptional boyfriend, sees him off on a plane to Italy to visit his dying mother, is surprised to learn he has a brother, inadvertently causes that brother to threaten suicide in the bakery where he lost his hand, makes a steak, falls in love with the brother, receives a makeover, goes to the opera for the first time, discovers that her father is having an affair, kicks a can, calls off her engagement and accepts a new proposal of marriage. All normal New York stuff for anyone who has ever lived there. Even those who have not are liable to be overcome with nostalgia for a version of the city they might have known.

The film constructs scenes of normalcy with a fetishist’s care. The semipermeable privacy of a table for two in a crowded restaurant; the afternoon-devouring nature of insignificant errands; the frequent entrances and exits of extended relations braided into and among one another’s days — all are drawn with fastidious accuracy while the plot unfolds at a pleasingly bustling clip. (That itself is another concept that evaporated as the coronavirus transmogrified time into slow-stretching taffy.) The most realistic aspect of all is, improbably, Cher, who slips into the role of Loretta with such quiet efficiency that certain moments — a scene in which she buys $11.99 worth of Champagne, for instance — play almost like documentary footage.

To appreciate the scale of the central miracle of this film — the Loretta Castorini-ty of Cher — a person must, if possible, talk to Cher, who is even more like herself than you imagine. One afternoon in November, amid abundant pillows the colors of sand at every angle of the sun, she sat, long and regal in her home in Malibu, her center-parted black hair waterfalling over each shoulder in exactly the way Cher’s hair does. She had agreed to Zoom about her performance in “Moonstruck” for an amount of time under two hours. (“You know what, guys,” she said, magnanimously implying a group of people, “I don’t know two hours’ worth of the movie.”) She was warm and funny and, despite being indoors, neither removed nor acknowledged stupendous mirrored aviator shades that obscured roughly one-quarter of her face. She explained how she was cajoled by the “kids on Twitter” into personally rescuing one particular elephant from a crumbling Pakistani zoo — an undertaking she described as “very complicated and very expensive,” while being visibly thrilled to help accomplish it. She said things like “It’s a stupid story—” (self-deprecating laugh, shrug) “— Bob Geldof and I were in Qatar. … ”

By the time she made “Moonstruck” at age 40, Cher, who earned (with her partner Sonny Bono) her first No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 at age 19, had been famous for half her life. She had scored a dozen Top 10 hits. She had starred in three permutations of her own popular television variety show. She had come back (after going) and then come back again — but not for the last time. She had had a successful Las Vegas residency. She had starred in multiple critically acclaimed films and been feted at Cannes. She had only one name, and everyone knew whom you meant when you said it.

Her portrayal of a plain Jane working-class woman who lives with her parents should have been about as distracting as Rodeo Drive standing in for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But this is what you see when you watch “Moonstruck”: a woman who bears a passing resemblance to Cher, but is clearly not her. Loretta Castorini is not a wallflower, exactly — more like a dandelion. No muss; no fuss; no inclinations or aspirations to reinvent herself as another class of bloom; neither choosy about the bee that pollinates her, nor desperate to be pollinated — at least, until she meets Nicolas Cage’s character; not showy, but not timid either. (Cher the performer, in this metaphor, would be something like a dancing lady orchid.)

You see a woman who talks with her hands in a way entirely different from Cher, who also talks with her hands. Loretta’s hands grab her words by the lapel, are centimeters away from strangling them; Cher’s hands run through her words like water. You see a New Yorker the way New Yorkers are in real life: polite until threatened or delayed, unflappable in the face of screaming strangers, brisk, sentimental, assumed to be Italian. (Loretta actually is Italian; Cher is not.)

The chasm between Loretta and Cher was the point, for her. “Dowdy” was not a state of being Cher experienced outside major film productions, where costumers and hair and makeup artists were hired for the unnatural task of dressing Cher down. In an interview published in 1987 in The Los Angeles Times, Cher, from the set of “Moonstruck,” explained that she preferred playing the head-down gray-haired pre-makeover Loretta to the carefree raven-tressed prancing version immortalized on the film’s poster: “The freedom is not interesting to me because that’s something I know, usually,” she said.

“ ‘Moonstruck’ is special,” Cher said decades later over Zoom. “It’s when everything is right. And I can look back — I’m actually looking outside right now,” she clarified, her head angled toward an unseen window, “but I can look back and remember so many moments of it. And it was because we were always together. And we really got along. Really, really got along. We just loved each other.

“I remember being in the old house where we all were,” she said, recollecting the Federal-style brownstone on Cranberry Street in Brooklyn Heights that served as the Castorini family residence. (While most of the picture’s interior scenes were filmed in Toronto, a handful were shot on location in New York.) “It was loaded with — not horrible old smells, but it was … it was old. It just had that feeling of being old, like in another time. Like in the 1900s. Turn of the century.” Cher’s contemplative expression and ramrod sedentary posture gave her the aura of a Byzantine icon. As she searched for her words, she was like someone determined to do justice to a dream. “You know, sometimes old-house smell is just ‘Yucky, get me out of here’? This was an old-house smell that you thought, I could have been brought up in this house and been very happy.”

Although Cher has not seen the film in years, she spoke of “Moonstruck” as fondly as any fan. Her effusive and encyclopedic assessments embraced everyone from Cage (“There was no one for this film but Nicky!”) to Nada Despotovich, whose delivery of a handful of lines is imprinted in Cher’s memory. (“I love the little girl that played Chrissy! She was really good.”) She didn’t “know if Feodor” — Chaliapin Jr., who played her grandfather — “smoked a cigar,” but she remembered that he did. She recalled “the crispy, cold-feeling smell” of the winter air when Loretta kicked a can down the street, and the good warm-bread smell of the bakery where Ronny Cammareri lost his hand.

When people on Twitter send Cher questions — or even just observations — about the film, she often writes back in the lively, idiosyncratic style that has earned her a cult following among younger generations who missed the offline decades of Cher. This is how we learned that, during the scene when Loretta and Ronny attend “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera House, there was “no opera, but Norman [Jewison, the director] described it magnificently, & MUSIC SLAYED.” Also that Cher’s boyfriend at the time, a bagel maker from Queens named Robert Camilletti, whom she met at a Manhattan club on her 40th birthday, “was off camera WATCHING [eye emoji] NIKKI.” (That would be Cage.)

At the house on Cranberry Street, Cher said, the cast “never felt like we were acting.” She described the group passing time in an out-of-the-way den before shooting. “We would be studying our lines, but we’d be talking and whatever. And,” she began to laugh, “then we would get up from where we were, and go and sit down, and do the same thing, just with the lines!”

The emotional notes of “Moonstruck” are operatic. But the specificity of characters — their quirks that come across not as quirky but as evidence of their longer and deeper lives beyond the confines of the movie — satisfies a pandemic-driven craving for the company of strangers. (The film’s screenwriter, John Patrick Shanley, is due much credit here.) Loretta’s fiancé is attached to his pinkie ring to a degree that is nettlesome, the more so because it is not unrealistic. The gestures Cher makes when Loretta speaks look uncannily like ones someone is really making in real life. I asked her whose gestures they were. “Robert had certain hand gestures, and so did Julie, so I just picked them up,” Cher said.

Julie was Bovasso, the native Brooklynite who played Loretta’s aunt, Rita Cappomaggi, and also served as cast dialogue coach. Robert was Camilletti, her boyfriend. “Like, Robert was trying to teach me how to say ‘theatuh,’” Cher said. “But when he would say ‘theatuh,’ he’d say —” she made a short palm-up outward motion with her hand, as if presenting the word — “theatuh.”

Before the film was released to the public, the cast did something that, for the time being, most people can do only in dreams: congregated at a theater in New York City to watch it.

“And we love it. We just love it,” Cher said, or more like sang. “And we’re just all so happy. And we don’t think it’s going to make very much money, but we are proud. We’re very proud of it. Very, very proud. Very proud.”

MGM, she recalled with colorful language, was less enamored. The studio feared the movie had no obvious audience.

“And I thought” — some more Technicolor language here — “but I’m proud of it anyway. I don’t care if no one goes to see it. So they just shelve it. And then a movie comes out for Christmas, but it just isn’t good, and they — well,” Cher revised, “I don’t know if it’s good or not. But it fell out of the theaters right away, and the only thing they had was ‘Moonstruck.’ ” (The film that may or may not have been good was the other romantic comedy MGM released on Dec. 16, 1987: “Overboard,” starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.)

“Moonstruck” opened in two small theaters in Manhattan and swiftly found its people. Before long, Cher said, it was spreading across multiplex screens “like a forest fire.”

Its unabashed earnestness may have acted as an accelerant. When Loretta, a native New Yorker, pops her head into Ronny’s apartment to ask, “Where’s the Met?” there is no trace of flirty, rom-com sheepishness in her voice; only bona fide New York crabbiness at having to go there. “Moonstruck” is a film that never winks at its audience; it seizes them in a firm embrace, kisses them on both cheeks and forces them to sit down and eat something. As a result, people hold back tightly to it, whether they first encountered it in the theater, as a VHS tape, on Hulu or on DVD. Coming across it is like finding a dollar on the sidewalk.

“Look at the performances!” Cher said. “The performances are great. There’s not a weak performance in that.” Although, she said behind her shades, “I never think I’m doing a good job.” When pressed, even Cher was forced to admit that her performance in a scene when Loretta informs her father of her impending marriage plans was quite nice. She liked the distracted way she played with the foil of a Champagne bottle.

The New York City Loretta inhabits resembles, in coronavirus times, something fantastical: a sprawling network of family and strangers to hug and kiss and yell at. It’s a comforting place to visit, however you can.

Returning there in her memory, Cher recounted an incident from early in the film’s run, when her New York overlapped with Loretta’s. She and her boyfriend had taken a guest to see the movie in a crowded theater. “You know when I put my foot out of the car?” Cher asked. She was referring to a shot in which the camera pans up from her delicate ankle to reveal Loretta stepping out of a taxicab at Lincoln Center. “This man in front of me, he went, ‘God she’s got a long skinny foot!’ And I went —” Cher clutched her face, luminous even after being broken down into a string of 1s and 0s and reconstituted as pixels in a Zoom meeting. “ ‘Oh, my God, ‘I do!’ How mean of him to say that when I’m sitting right behind him, even though he doesn’t know it.”

She still has the jeweled red heels that cradled the long skinny foot so bewitchingly onscreen — the same pair she wore to kick a can in Brooklyn Heights on the crispy, cold-smelling day. They are one of the few mementos she took from the set.

“I didn’t realize at that time you were supposed to keep things,” she said. “I would have kept more.”

Source: Movies - nytimes.com