I love Moonstruck. I am very surprised Moonstruck won this category. Its route to victory was not smooth. Moonstruck narrowly got out of the first round, taking down UHF in a run off, easily toped Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar in round 2, barely beat Tommy Boy in round 3 and defeated My Cousin Vinny in a close finals. The 1987 Academy Award winner is our 2021 Recommend If You Like Rewatch Tournament Funny Movie Winner.

Moonstruck is my mother’s favorite movie, a film that a much younger iteration of myself found unrelatable, maybe even a bit boring. It might be the most beloved movie for the entirety of my mother’s extended family, a clan who considers themselves to be very Italian, and fancies themselves the suburban, South Jersey version of the Castorini family portrayed in the movie. In the interest of painting the most accurate portrait of my family that I can, I should mention that we’re hardly Italian at all, save for one great-grandfather who managed to work a bona-fide Italian last name in the mix. We’re mostly Irish, and it’s a whole thing. We’ve spent many Christmases finishing off bottles of red wine, which only encourages my Jersey ancestry to max out on their Italian-ish American sensibilities, getting louder as the nights went on. Holiday evenings would finally wrap up during family visits while we scrolled through the options for something to watch, only to hear my mother yelling, “Mooooooonstruck!” from across the room. It took years of rewatches to recognize its true genius, but I think I might finally be there.

I don’t want to turn this into a whole thing about my mom, but there’s no way to not tie in my personal history with my mother to my love of Moonstruck. Being the obvious black sheep of the family growing up caused me to build a solid wall between us. The things she enjoyed, I outright rejected, resigning myself to an assumed life of a mother and child who spoke two completely different languages. Coming out to her as queer made the wall tumble down in one instant moment, giving me new insight into the person that she was and how she might still be influencing the person I was becoming. My favorite mutual love of ours is indeed Moonstruck, particularly the character of Loretta Castorini.

Cher’s Loretta is 37-years-old, single, widowed and living in the home of her parents. Instead of being presented as the worst case scenario for a woman, she’s shown to live a perfectly average life, embraced by her family, as overbearing as some of them may be. She has a good job that seems satisfactory enough. At 37, she’s already lived an entire lifetime before we meet her, far from the 20-somethings who typically have their stories told in romantic comedies, but not quite the elder Diane Keaton type we see at the other end of the genre spectrum. Loretta is remarkable, but only because she’s wonderfully unremarkable. 

I’ve always loved how Loretta’s magical swan transformation is hardly that at all. Before accompanying her fiance’s brother to the Metropolitan Opera, she has her hair professionally done and takes the dive in purchasing an evening gown. There’s no majestic and permanent change made for the comfort of her male counterpart, it’s only that she sees the opportunity to seize a moment of luxury and glamor, and make it her own. 

In the Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun model of rom com, the female protagonists are made single by traumatizing means played out onscreen, then flee the country on journeys of self discovery. Those movies present us with fantasy unapproachable to the average woman, as much as she may want to fuck off to Italy after heartbreak. Loretta continues to live her life and enters the embrace of her family after being widowed, which is the rational route most of us would take in the same circumstances. These other romantic comedies also tend to focus only on men and women of a certain age, folks who are on the precipice of middle age, if not already there. We’ll focus on the sex appeal of young singledom or the start of one’s golden years with ease while watching these movies, but there’s very little discussion about what this might look like at Loretta’s age.

I entered my 30s last month, spending most of my birthday asking the mirror “what the fuck?” and questioning how one is even supposed to find starting momentum in a new decade of life, when this particular age is so often associated with the menial work and family lives that are a mere continuation of what one did in their 20s. I rarely hear people discuss their 30s as times where they made their fresh starts, minus my cozy corner of the queer community where this seems far more common. At the later end of her 30s, Loretta doesn’t seem concerned about this new beginnings business at all, in fact, she’s more than happy to accept a marriage proposal from a man who promises a boring comfort, but comfort nonetheless. This foundation gets a healthy shake-up from the man who becomes her actual love interest, when she approaches her future brother-in-law to invite him to the wedding.

Opposite of Loretta is Nic Cage as Ronny, her fiance’s poorly tempered brother who runs a bakery and spends his days languishing in fury. As someone who has been known to hold a grudge or two, I love Ronny. He’s an unhinged love interest that by today’s standards, would be met with some deserved red flags, but in the context of Nic Cage in his most perfect role, isn’t he kind of dreamy? He lost his hand and his bride, but for those of us who love a sweaty guy yelling in a tank top, he’s won it all. There is very little in common between Ronny and the brother with whom Loretta is supposedly going to marry, but he represents a kind of newness that she might not find again for a long time. 

The tiny bridge Moonstruck built between my mother and I continues to grow. I spent enough time wringing my hands and fretting over turning 30 because I couldn’t see how the turbulence in my life would ever fit neatly into my 30s, fooling myself into thinking my chances to start over had all been used up. My mother, who was my age when she gave birth to me, had to forge her way through the awkwardness and discomfort of being single among her peers without being able to book a plane ticket to Europe and run away from her problems. Loretta and her family sit neatly in the middle between us, closer to my age, but following the same instincts my mother has developed over the last half decade to tighten existing relationships among friends and family. I push my mother to try out every new experience that arrives in front of her, while she encourages me to break ground and lay roots. 

The brunt of Moonstruck takes place over one chaotic evening, the kind of night we’ve all hopefully had where we might pause and note how much it feels like we’re in a movie. While in the grand scope of realism, a proposal, an affair, and a proposal all happening within the same few days is obviously unrealistic, there’s just enough of a sheen over the narrative that we buy into it. It’s romantic because it recognizes and names how absurd each situation the characters find themselves in as opposed to chalking it up to simple movie magic. We buy into Moonstruck because we’ve all been there in our own boring lives lived on auto pilot. Like Loretta, many are satisfied with our days of simplicity and rationality, but if we’re wise, we’ll chase wild romance and torrid adventure when we find it. Maybe we can have it all. If my mother and I can find the balance between the two, then there’s every reason to believe that it’s possible. 

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