Review of Benny & Joon (1993) by Kenneth L — 30 Nov 2013

This is a very cute, charming, but ultimately rather slight movie. It's got very good early performances by Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson, but otherwise is perhaps a little too light and airy for its own good. It ostensibly deals with mental illness, but you get the feeling they wouldn't get away with making this movie in quite this way these days - it treats the subject too lightly while pretending it isn't. Still, as a piece of early '90s whimsy, this movie does hold up reasonably well.

The film's titular characters are Benny (Aidan Quinn) and Joon (Masterson), adult siblings who live together. Benny's just a regular Joe, a hardworking mechanic who takes care of Joon, a talented painter who suffers from some unspecified mental illness (it seems to be schizophrenia, as near as we can tell). Everything is going fine until one day they meet Sam (Depp), a quiet eccentric who for unexplained reasons has decided to make his entire life into one long Buster Keaton/Charlie Chaplin mashup impersonation. You might guess where the story goes from there.

This was one of the roles that, along with his early movies with Tim Burton, helped establish Depp's quirky character-actor credentials (before Pirates of the Caribbean turned him into a blockbuster star). It is indeed a fun performance, charming and winning where almost any other actor might have been grating. Masterson does a very good job as Joon, though she has one of those mental illnesses that seems to exist at the convenience of the screenplay - she's pretty sane and rational when the movie wants her to be, and a raving lunatic when it wants her to be that. Masterson does her best with it, but it's the sort of thing that you sense people would be harsher about were the movie made today. Aidan Quinn is fine as Benny, who by necessity is kind of a boring straight-man character.

Overall, this is the kind of movie best described as a "minor classic." It's not a masterpiece, and has aged in some noticeable ways, but it's still a fun, modest little film with very likable characters. Depp's got some memorable scenes here, particularly those where he does Keaton/Chaplin routines. If you're a fan of Depp, particularly his pre-Pirates work, it's worth checking out.