Benny and Joon... fajrdrako's commentary

[fajrdrako]

I got this movie from the public library because it is a Johnny Depp movie from 1993. People who have seen it told me it was 'sweet' or 'charming'. This filled me with trepidation, but hey, it's Johnny Depp, and I am currently besotted by a certain scoundrelly pirate.

I see the movie is only ten years old - ? That seems incredible. I thought, from the story, from Depp's acting, from all sorts of clues, that it was much older than that.

I thought I would have to return the movie unwatched to the library because (as usual) I was too busy to watch it, but I woke up early with menstrual cramps and it seemed just the thing to get my mind off my misery.

There are essentially three characters in the movie, maybe three and a half: Benny (Aidan Quinn), a guy with who devotes his life to his car-repair business and his schizophrenic sister; Joon, the sister (Mary Stuart Masterson); and Sam (Johnny Depp), a cute non-verbal and mostly-illiterate stranger who wanders into their lives. The half-character is Ruth, a failed actress whom Benny might be having a romance with if Joon didn't preoccupy him all the time.

The movie is light and whimsical and I kept wondering if it was trivializing the problems of mental illness, and if it was, whether I thought that was a bad thing.

The central dilemma of the movie is: how can Benny get a life (i.e., a girlfriend) and still adequately care for Joon, his increasingly-demanding responsibility? Note that schizophrenia is my diagnosis of her condition, since the movie never mentions the word; but she's temperamental, sets fires, does 'weird things' like try to direct traffic with a ping pong bat, and she hears voices sometimes. The doctor wants to put Joon into a 'group home' (which she makes sound Utopian, and easy to get into). Benny doesn't want to shirk responsibilities.

Joon wins Sam in a poker game - someone else's unwanted mooch of a roommate. He keeps house (a great reason to keep him around, besides his general cuteness), makes grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron on 'rayon' setting on an ironing board, and knows all movies by heart, while playing a gentle Buster Keaton with hat-tricks at every turn.

Sam likes Joon. She likes him. They have sex. They tell Benny, who kicks Sam him out without so much as asking a few pertinent questions, like, "Did you use a condom?" Joon and Sam try to run away together but Joon has a psychotic episode and ends up in the hospital. Benny and Sam join forces, and stage a Mission-Impossible like break-in to her hospital room to talk to her. Joon thinks Benny hates her because he keeps trying to control her life.

Everybody agrees to see if things will work out if Joon has her own apartment. Benny gets to date Ruth, Joon and Sam get to iron their sandwiches into the sunset (if you'll forgive a mixed metaphor), and that's that.

Nobody ever asks the really important questions, like: "Is she taking her meds regularly?" and: "Who's going to pay the rent?" (Benny, of course. And Ruth is supporting Sam on a waitress's salary?)

Despite all my quibbles and my inability to suspend disbelief, I thought the movie had three great moments:

1. When Joon first sees Sam, he's sitting in a tree. When she next meets him, many scenes later, he's on the ground.
   
   
   Joon: You're out of your tree.
   Sam: It wasn't my tree.
   
   
   
2. Sam has been doing a very athletic Charlie Chaplin routine that has everyone in stitches. Benny says, in admiration, "Do you go to school to learn to do things like that?"
   
   Sam replies, "I got kicked out of school for doing things like that."
   
   
3. In the climactic scenes, Joon thinks she has scared Sam away forever, and is listlessly taking part in a conversation with Benny and the doctor about her fate. Then she sees Sam, swinging as if on a trapeze, past her hospital room window. This gives her heart to face the future. I cried; I love scenes where people think their love is lost or has betrayed them, and then discover that the lover is true, and has come back.
   

Bottom line: it's a waste to have Johnny Depp in a movie, and then make him non-verbal and one-dimensional. The movie had a good heart, but was annoyingly shallow.

Comments

[dargie.livejournal.com]

Y'know I've never seen the film, but from all the commentary I've heard on it over the years (apart from the "Johnny is so good in it" stuff) I'd have to say that I tend to agree with you on this one. It struck me as being a sanitized and romanticized version of mental illness. I've had more than my share of contact with people with various mental problems and it's never pretty or cute or endearing. It grinds you down until you just wish they'd leave or die or something. I have nothing but admiration for their caregivers, and I don't believe for a moment that the real treatment for schizophrenia (or whatever she suffers from) is a goofy, free-spirited guy who can't hold a job. I think it's a disservice to everyone to pretend otherwise.

What might've worked for me is to tone Joon down to the point where she's one of those goofy, free-spirited types, too, being over-protected by her brother, and when she meets Sam, they both recogize that in order to have the life they want, they've got to take responsibility for themselves. And then they get Benny to recognize that they can take that responsibility. Blah, blah, blah, the end.

I hate it when mental illness is played for cuteness or romance.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

apart from the "Johnny is so good in it" stuff

Yes, well, he is, and that, frankly, is what redeems the movie - insofar as it is redeemed. In retrospect, I am sorry that Benny is the prime viewpoint character, because he's the simplest. I would have liked to have known more about what the events of the movie felt like from Joon's point of view, or Sam's - what must it have been like for her, to know she has such a thin hold on sanity, and to be in love for the first time? And for him, to be so vulnerable and have no resources, and to care about someone so needy? so potentially dangerous to herself? so out of control?

Somehow it twisted so that Benny's concern was made to see like overprotectiveness and a need to control, even a desire to keep her ill, and that didn't seem right to me at all.