This is not the iconic poster, but that poster has had me thinking for decades that this film was just schmaltz, when in fact it's... well, it's very good schmaltz! And the above much better captures the real feel of the film. I feel like I say this about every film I've heard about but not seen, but it wasn't what I was expecting, in a good way. It's a very word-dense film, so it's lucky all the actors are so animated and in general just excellent. It's set in the Italian community of pre-gentrified Brooklyn, and in general ladles on the Italian-ness, even though the three Oscar-winners (scriptwriter (John Patrick Shanley), lead actress (Cher) and supporting actress (Olympia Dukakis)) were respectively, "Irish as hell", Armenian, and Greek. The basic plot is that Cher is a 37-year-old (she was actually already in her 40s) widow, still living with her parents (in a house they owned that would probably be worth ten figures by now) and her paternal grandpa, a real Italian and inveterate dog lover (that's him on the right, above), who, as the film starts, is proposed to by Danny Aiello, who is a decent man that she is prepared to marry, but whom she doesn't love. This is all right, she thinks, because marrying the man she loved brought her bad luck (he got run over by a bus). But then Aiello's Johnny heads off to Sicily to sit with his dying mother, leaving Cher's Loretta to plan the wedding, as well as make sure that Johnny's estranged brother, Ronny, agrees to come, to fix the bad blood that's festered between the brothers for some years. Ronny turns out to be a young Nic Cage with a wooden hand, which is the cause of the bad blood: Ronny, who works in a bakery, was engaged when Johnny paid him a visit and (claims Ronny), distracted him while he was working the slicing machine... And when his fiancée saw that he was maimed, she left him. Ronny is, as you would expect from a character played by Nic Cage, dramatic, and Loretta is inspired to try to talk some sense into him. She accompanies him to his (also very nice) flat above the bakery and cooks him a steak ("bloody, because you need some blood in you"). They then get to drinking and swapping sob stories, she tells him he's got a wolf in him (something she got from overhearing an old couple bickering in a store she frequents) and he ends up proving it by sweeping her off her feet and into the bedroom. That night they witness the titular moon, which reminds Loretta's uncle of the moon that he saw many years ago when Loretta's pop was smitten by his sister, and spending all night outside the house gazing up at her window. Loretta thinks she's made a terrible mistake, and wants Ronny to forget it ever happened, and, although smitten, he agrees to keep quiet so long as she goes to the opera with him tonight. Well she gets all tarted up (unnecessarily, to my mind - she is radiant from the start of the film with her patches of grey) and shows up, and is of course moved (it's La Boheme) but also spies her father with his mistress, whom her mother had just earlier in the day told her about. Meanwhile, her mother goes out to eat alone at the restaurant that Johnny proposed to Loretta in earlier and sees, just as they did, a young woman throwing water on an older man and storming off. The older man is John "Frasier's dad, Marty Crane" Mahoney, and he accepts her invitation to come over and eat with her. Turns out he's a professor at NYU who has a habit of serially dating his students. She is currently understandably interested in the topic of why men chase women and speculates it's because of a fear of death. Anyway, they have a pleasant meal and he walks her home, and (to her horror) they cross paths with her father in law walking the dogs. And then Ronny, who gives an impassioned speech about how love is in fact a terrible thing, but nonetheless suited to such imperfect creatures as humans, and gets Loretta into bed again. And then Johnny shows up, home early from Sicily! Will Loretta still marry him? Will her father pay for the wedding, despite disapproving of Johnny? Will her mother dump him? Will he dump his mistress? Will his father tell him about John Mahoney squiring his wife? Well, you'll have to watch it. And you won't be sorry.
Although Cher, Dukakis and Mahoney aren't Italian, the cast is rounded out by certifiable Italians who are without exception excellent. Not only is this film unusual in having its leading lady almost 20 years older than its leading man, it is also unusual in caring, and making us care, about the love-lives of very much not spring chickens. Surprisingly moving - very funny, but even more Rom than Com.
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