Here is the thesis, and I am going to state it up front because I think it is correct and I do not want to sneak up on it: Benny & Joon is the last American movie that sincerely believed being weird was a form of goodness. Not a symptom. Not a brand. Not a personality you curate on a profile. A moral quality, like honesty or courage, that a person could possess and that could, under the right lighting, fix another person. Every movie made after it that tried to say the same thing knew it was lying. Benny & Joon did not know. That is why it is embarrassing, and that is why I would defend it in court.
The stronger version of the thesis, the one I actually believe, is this: the fact that the movie has been almost entirely erased by its own opening-credits song is not an accident or a tragedy. It is the movie’s argument winning. But we will get there.
April 16, 1993
Let me put you in the room, because the room matters.
It is a Friday in the middle of April. Snow’s “Informer” is the number one song in America and has been for five weeks, which means that in every car in every parking lot outside every multiplex, a white Canadian is toasting “a licky boom boom down” and nobody can explain what it means and nobody is trying. Bill Clinton has been president for less than three months. The Waco standoff is in its seventh week and will end, on fire, the following Monday. Beavis and Butt-Head is five weeks old. There is no such thing as a website you have heard of. If you want to see a movie you either go to the theater or you go to a store and physically rent it, and the store has a wall, and the wall is the culture.
That weekend, the number one movie in the country was Indecent Proposal, an R-rated film about Robert Redford paying a million dollars to sleep with Demi Moore. Its male lead was Woody Harrelson. Woody Harrelson had gotten that part by walking out of Benny & Joon, where he had been cast as Benny, and MGM had sued him for more than $5 million for doing it. So when Benny & Joon opened that same weekend, in fifth place, on 408 screens, with $3.29 million, it was sitting four spots below the guy who had abandoned it, who was now the most famous cuckold in the country. I find this almost unbearably perfect. The movie about a family that cannot let go of each other was outgrossed, five to one, by the movie about a marriage that could be rented.
And yet it worked. It went wide the next week and rose 16 percent, which movies did not do then and do not do now. It ended up with a little over $23 million domestic on a $13 million budget. Nobody got rich. Nobody got fired. It was, in the truest 1993 sense, a sleeper: a movie you found out about from a person, not an ad.
What it actually is
If you have not seen it in thirty years, here is what happens. Benny (Aidan Quinn, hired days before the cameras rolled, after Harrelson bolted) runs a garage in Spokane and takes care of his sister Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson, also hired days before the cameras rolled, after Laura Dern passed and Winona Ryder, then dating Johnny Depp, fell out when they broke up). Joon paints. Joon sets things on fire. Joon directs traffic with a ping-pong paddle. In a poker game with absurd stakes she loses a hand and wins Sam (Depp), a nearly wordless drifter who cannot read, who dresses like Buster Keaton, who irons grilled-cheese sandwiches and mashes potatoes with a tennis racket, and whose stated life ambition is a job at the video store.
Read that last sentence again. In 1993 a screenwriter looked at the whole American economy and decided that the purest possible dream for a holy fool was the video store. That is not a joke in the film. That is the happy ending. He gets the job.
Roger Ebert, who liked it, said the movie approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. He also pointed out that Joon is schizophrenic and that the script never once says the word out loud, and that the marketing scrubbed any hint of mental illness so it could be sold as an oddball romance. Janet Maslin in the Times called the premise dangerously fanciful and then admitted it mostly got away with it. David Ansen at Newsweek said movies that make mental illness cute give him the heebie-jeebies, and then conceded this was one of the more palatable ones. That is the whole critical response in miniature: every serious person in the country recognized that the movie was doing something it should not be allowed to do, and every one of them let it.
Why? I have a theory, and the theory is that they had no defense against it yet.
The thing we did not have a word for
In April 1993 there was no vocabulary for what this movie is. “Neurodivergent” did not exist in the culture. “Manic pixie dream girl” would not be coined for another twelve years, and when it was, it would describe a woman whose eccentricity exists to fix a sad man; Benny & Joon is the exact inverse, an eccentric man whose entire function is to fix a woman, and nobody has ever needed a term for that because Hollywood has only made about four of them. “Quirky” was not yet a slur. Wes Anderson was a film student. Reality Bites was ten months away. Nobody had yet been told, by a magazine, that Generation X was ironic, and so it was still possible to sit in a theater and watch a grown man do the dinner-roll dance from The Gold Rush and feel something other than the urge to explain why you were feeling it.
This is the part I want to be precise about, because it is where the nostalgia lives. The movie is not good because it is realistic about schizophrenia. It is wildly unrealistic about schizophrenia. Joon hears voices on a bus, gets restrained by paramedics, spends a stretch in a hospital, and then Sam performs a Harold Lloyd routine on the outside of the building, dangling from a window, and she is well enough to move into an apartment with him. That is not a treatment plan. That is a fable, and the film knows it is a fable in the sense that it has the tone of one, but it does not know it is a fable in the sense that it thinks it is true. It sincerely believes that if one person is strange enough, in the right direction, the strangeness can be aimed at another person’s suffering like a flashlight.
And here is my strong opinion, the one I will not soften: that belief is wrong, and the movie is better for holding it than any movie since has been for knowing better.
Because the alternative, the thing we got instead, is thirty years of films that are correct. Films with the medication named. Films where the eccentric sister gets a diagnosis in the second act and a support group in the third. Films that would never dream of letting a man with an illiteracy nobody discusses be the cure for anything, because the script consultant would flag it. Those films are more responsible. Some of them are very good. None of them will make you cry in a Spokane kitchen, and none of them will send a five-year-old Scottish single to number three on the Hot 100.
The song is the point
Which brings us to the thing everybody actually remembers.
“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” was released in 1988. It hit number one in Australia and New Zealand and did nothing in America. By 1993 the Proclaimers were, by their own account, mostly raising children and following Hibernian Football Club. Then Mary Stuart Masterson, asked by her director to bring music to paint to, brought that song. Jeremiah Chechik put it over the opening credits. It went to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer, five years late, and it has never really left. It is a wedding song now. It is a stadium song. It is a song that a British comedian and a twin in glasses took to number one in the UK in 2007 for charity. It has outlived the movie so completely that most people under forty who can sing every word of it could not tell you it was ever attached to Johnny Depp.
Consider what that song is. It is two men in glasses, without a shred of irony, promising to walk a thousand miles to fall down at somebody’s door. It is the most sincere hit single of the decade. It is a song that could not have been a hit in 1988 America, where the charts were Bobby Brown and Def Leppard, and could not be a hit in 1998 America, where the charts were Puff Daddy and Aerosmith power ballads, and was a hit precisely in the window of 1993 when a small MGM movie about lovable lunatics could sneak into a Friday and rise on its second weekend. The song and the movie are the same object. They are both saying: a person who is too much, in public, without apology, is not a problem to be managed. He is the point.
So no, I do not think it is sad that the song ate the movie. I think the song is the movie, compressed to three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, stripped of the diagnosis nobody wanted to name, and set loose in the world, where it did exactly what Sam does. It walked into rooms it had no business being in and made everybody in them a little less embarrassed to be alive.
The Depp problem, which is really a 1993 problem
There is a reason the movie is harder to watch now, and it is not the schizophrenia.
In 1993 Johnny Depp was a blank. That is not an insult; it was his whole appeal. He had done 21 Jump Street and hated it, done Cry-Baby and Edward Scissorhands, and was about to do Gilbert Grape and Ed Wood. He was the most famous actor in America who seemed to want nothing from you. Sam is that Depp distilled: a man with no backstory, no wants, no lines, whose entire self is borrowed from dead comedians. You could project anything onto him. That was the deal.
You cannot project anything onto Johnny Depp now. He arrives in every frame pre-loaded. And the loading happened slowly enough that you can watch it in real time if you read the reviews in order. In 2005 Inside Pulse was still marveling that the Academy had finally noticed what everyone who rented Benny & Joon already knew. By 2011 the same site’s Monday Morning Critic was diagnosing “Captain Jack Sparrow Syndrome” and declaring that a Depp credit was no longer a reliable indicator of anything. Six years, blank to brand. That is not the movie’s fault and it is not really Depp’s either, in the sense that no actor could have stayed a blank for thirty years. But it means the thing the movie was selling, a purely receptive kind of strangeness, a weirdness that asked nothing back, is now unavailable to the man who embodied it. Which is, when you think about it, a very Benny & Joon outcome. The film ends by insisting that love does not need to know your history. Three decades later, it turns out history was the one thing love could not get rid of.
Masterson, meanwhile, did the opposite. She played a woman whose whole condition was being too legible, every feeling on the surface, and then she went and had the quiet career, the theater and the small films and the directing. Joon is her best-remembered role and it is a role about a person who cannot hide, played by an actress who spent the rest of her life declining to be seen. I do not have a theory about that. I just think it is worth noticing.
What it does not survive, and what it does
The correct modern take is available to anyone who wants it. Benny is controlling. Sam is not a substitute for care. Joon is a plot device with a paintbrush. The ending is a fantasy that a real family would pay for in the fourth act the movie declines to film. All of that is true, and if you write it down you will feel smart and you will have learned nothing about 1993.
Here is what you learn if you watch it as an artifact instead of a case study. You learn that there was a specific spring, between the end of one kind of America and the start of the internet, when it was still possible to believe that the answer to a person in pain was another person being strange at them until they laughed. You learn that this belief was wrong. You learn that it was shared, briefly and completely, by a studio, a director, a cast assembled in a panic days before shooting, a nation of critics who knew better, and about two million ticket buyers who found the movie the way you found everything then, because somebody told you to.
And you learn that the belief did not die. It just moved. It left the movie, which nobody watches, and it climbed into a song, which everybody sings, and it is still out there, at every wedding, in every stadium, being shouted by people who have no idea they are agreeing with a 1993 MGM picture about a schizophrenic painter and a man who irons sandwiches.
I would walk five hundred miles for that. I mean it without irony, which is the only way it was ever meant.
