It is the wacky meet the wackier, in Jeremiah S. Chechik’s BENNY & JOON, the titular siblings, Benny (Quinn) has been tending to his mentally ill younger sister Joon (Masterson) for 15 years ever since their parents perished in an automobile accident, it is high time to break the status quo when they let Sam (Depp), an eccentric cousin of Benny’s friend Mike (Grifasi) to stay with them as an ad hoc housekeeper, magic happens.
Not so often we have a mentally disturbed protagonist in a movie who is not confined in a dismal asylum, still that option hangs there like a ticking bomb which Benny mulls over constantly, on the one hand, while their life is not by any rate, uncomfortable (Benny is a garage owner), he feels opportunity of any romance is snuffed by the noble responsibility of taking care of Joon (but that is not strictly the case), and on the other hand, this selfless deed serves him greatly, as a dedicated caretaker, a self-sacrificing brother, Benny really enjoys his heroic devotion, even during a date with potential love interest Ruthie (Moore), he is compelled to let that out to elevate himself above his peers, “my life is complicated….” which is sharply rebuked by Ruthie, who is more than the nice neighborly girl one might expect her to be, and knows how to draw the line.
The rub is, when Sam and Joon grow closer, the former’s childlike naiveté wondrously communes with the latter’s irrational idiosyncrasy and imaginativeness (“a raisin is a humiliated grape”), they even physically warm up to each other, which threatens Benny’s authoritative reign over Joon and he flares up instantaneously, hardly realizes it is such a beautiful thing that Joon might have a chance to fall in love like a normal person, the realization will come later in the climax though, well as expected, where a cheery happy ending is not too saccharine to warm the cockles of our hearts.
Whereas Quinn efficaciously injects some fine-grained foibles into Benny’s wholesomeness, and Masterson metes out Joon’s schizophrenic outburst on the ballast of the plight befalls a marginalized soul, the godsend materializes in the person of Depp’s Sam, utterly smudging the distinction between neurotypical and neurodivergent, who dons a pork-pie hat and wields a cane, emulating Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin’s shticks like nobody’s business, not least for his striking somersault stunts, a variation of the kooky characters Depp has excelled in concretizing and would continue to purvey in his ever-expanding filmography, then as regards the prospect of this unorthodox union of the fool and the crazy, how long is a piece of string?
referential entries: John Waters’ CRY-BABY (1990, 6.2/10); Tim Burton’s EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990, 8.9/10).
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