Team Experience is celebrating Winona Ryder for her 50th birthday this week
by Eric Blume
With more than a half dozen films behind her, this week's birthday girl Winona Ryder received her first major awards attention with 1990’s Mermaids. This slight comedy-drama, directed by Richard Benjamin, garnered the young actress "Best Supporting Actress" from the National Board of Review and a Golden Globe nomination, too. While that praise seems a little generous in hindsight, the film features some lovely work from Winona who is up against a very wobbly picture...
Mermaids takes place in 1965, but not really… it takes place in a cartoon movie-version of 1965. The whole movie, indeed, is a cartoon, with a script built on sitcom-level jokes and broadly sketched situations. The plot as it were centers around an unconventional single mom (Cher) who moves her two daughters (Winona and a very young Christina Ricci) every few months to a new town she picks at random.
This is the kind of movie where this working-class single mom always wears fabulous clothes she could never afford, and in fact never seems to have a concern about money or anything else that involves reality. 15-year-old Winona rebels against Mom’s overt sexuality by obsessing over Catholicism, nuns, and saints, while at the same time longing for the local young handyman (played by Sixteen Candles hunk Michael Schoeffling). Also in the mix is Mom’s local man (Bob Hoskins, the MVP here, in a relaxed, winning performance), who ingratiates himself into the family.
Nothing in the film amounts to anything, which of course would be fine if the lines had some unique flavor or spark, or a weird kinetic energy, Scbut the movie just kind of lays there in a bit of a listless lump. Winona narrates the film with writing that overstates the obvious of what we’re seeing, and lacks any legit jokes or insight. It’s the sort of film that relies on the audience falling in love with these small characters, hoping their likability and quirks will keep us following along even though nothing is happening. Benjamin can never make the movie take flight -- it’s just full-fledged “harmless.”
On the plus side, Cher and Winona have a delightful chemistry. This movie was made in that small window where Cher had moments of unself-consciousness about her… her character makes zero sense, but she finds a few zings in her line-readings and has a breeziness that inflates the film here and there. She and Winona, who do feel like they could be a mother-daughter pait, find something truthful in their roundelay of resentments.
Winona’s natural charm and innate sense of how to play for camera are on full display. She carries the movie effortlessly and has a few inspired moments, like licking Schoeffling’s coat when she falls into his arms. But the character as written is monotonous… there’s not a lot of rainbow in the performance, and it feels tight and contained. She scores moment-to-moment and within each scene, but in the same ways over and over again.
Winona and her then boyfriend Johnny Depp at the Golden Globes for Mermaids
My guess is that the critical acclaim happened because everyone was falling in love with Winona in real time. Mermaids landed right in the window where she’d had a few hits and was quickly gathering favourite-of-her-generation momentum. What's more the movie offered up her first naturalistic leading performance, since her earlier triumphs had leaned emphatically toward the stylized (Beetlejuice, Heathers). In that respect, it’s a key Winona performance, but it’s hard to recommend sitting through Mermaids to see it.
up next: The Age of Innocence