Mermaids stars Ryder as Charlotte Flax, a straight-laced teenager stuck in provincial Massachusetts after being shuffled across the country by her freewheeling single mother. A wannabe Catholic and disavowed secular Jew, Charlotte worries that a crush on the local janitor will lead her to a life of sin, while her mother, played by none other than Cher, struggles to reconcile her dating life with the realities of motherhood and small-town gossip. Styled in a bouffant big enough to have its own gravitational pull, Cher steals every scene she waltzes into, but Ryder, with her nervous smile and fumbling awkwardness, makes an admirable foil, and together the two women construct an authentically charming two-hander about mother-daughter relationships at the dawn of women’s lib. (The cast is rounded out by Bob Hoskins, who applies his loveable hothead schtick to the role of Cher’s short king boyfriend, and making her film debut as Ryder’s younger sister is a pint-sized Christina Ricci, who would go on to develop her own version of a defiant female archetype through movies such as The Addams Family, Now & Then, The Opposite of Sex, and Prozac Nation.)
Mermaids is held together by Ryder’s diaristic voiceover, an internal monologue that exposes her character as naive and insecure, traits that the high-strung Charlotte, in typical teenage fashion, would rather keep to herself. Convinced that she’s pregnant after kissing her crush, Charlotte books an appointment at the family clinic, where she waits amongst a sea of single mothers and crying babies, her face contorted in disgust while reading a pamphlet emblazoned with a print that reads I am a woman giving birth to myself, the famous feminist slogan coined by artist and activist Marcia Salo Rizzi. When her doctor asks if she knows where babies come from, Charlotte nods confidently. (Voiceover: Please God I want to die.) “Then why did you think you were pregnant?” asks her doctor. “You’re still a virgin.” (Voiceover: I want to die now. Right now.) It’s in these moments that Ryder shines, her doe-eyes stunned when youthful hubris crashes against its context, which in this case includes limited sexual education and burgeoning access to the pill a few years shy of Roe V. Wade.
"To a child both precocious and weird, the actress loomed large, somewhere between role model and Platonic ideal."
Emerging from the same context but tonally much more serious, Girl, Interrupted stars Ryder as Susanna Kaysen, a recent high school graduate sent to live in a psychiatric facility in rural New England following a dubious aspirin overdose. Committed by her parents against her will, Susanna is forced to reckon with the misogyny both inside and outside the hospital alongside a gaggle of compatriots including Brittany Murphy, Elizabeth Moss, and Clea Duvall (her second time playing an institutionalized youth, if we consider RuPaul’s conversion camp in But I’m a Cheerleader, released that same year.) Other notable faces include Whoopi Goldberg as the ward’s head nurse, a woman forced to act as mammy to a group of mentally ill white women, and Jared Leto, who briefly appears as a disillusioned draft dodger in the most obvious fake beard I’ve ever seen. The movie’s standout performance belongs to Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for her role as Lisa Rowe, a diagnosed sociopath and Susanna’s psych ward bestie. Lisa arrives at the hospital in a long shearling coat, wrestling two cops on either arm. Susanna is immediately transfixed, and so are we. Remember when Angelina Jolie was an actor? It’s a shame she’s mostly left that behind because her on-screen charisma is a bigger contribution to humanity than any of her tax-deductible charity work.
As she did with Cher in Mermaids, Ryder complements Jolie’s powerhouse performance with something more subdued but no less compelling, resulting in an occasionally melodramatic but ultimately heartfelt portrait of young women caring for each other in a world that couldn’t care less. In one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, Lisa and Susanna steal a guitar and tambourine and sit outside solitary confinement, where one of their ward mates has been banished, and serenade the crying patient with an off-key rendition of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” Jolie’s rasp adding extra oomph to Ryder’s warble. I’ve watched this scene several times, and it never fails to make me cry.
"In a way, Susanna Kaysen is the role Ryder had been studying to play her whole career, a young woman told to behave a certain way or else."
In a way, Susanna Kaysen is the role Ryder had been studying to play her whole career, a young woman told to behave a certain way or else. In 2001, a little over a year after the release of Girl, Interrupted, the actress was arrested for shoplifting in Beverly Hills (among the designers she stole was Marc Jacobs, whose dress she would later wear to the hearing), a transgression she attributed to a period of poor mental health, exacerbated by painkillers prescribed to her by a doctor whose licence would later be revoked. The scandal triggered a lengthy hiatus from showbiz, a break from which her career has arguably never fully recovered. In an Esquire profile ahead of the recent Beetlejuice reboot, Ryder recalled the media circus that surrounded the incident, the snarky headlines and cruel press. “If you look at the period from 2000 to 2010,” she said, “it was the most degrading time to be a woman." A poignant pull quote, one that could work as a tagline for Mermaids, Girl, Interrupted, or pretty much anything in Ryder’s filmography, whether set in the ‘60s or the 1600s. Only a handful of movie stars are able to be both timeless and of their time, and Ryder is one of them. No matter the year, she’s Winona forever.
Mermaids stars Ryder as Charlotte Flax, a straight-laced teenager stuck in provincial Massachusetts after being shuffled across the country by her freewheeling single mother. A wannabe Catholic and disavowed secular Jew, Charlotte worries that a crush on the local janitor will lead her to a life of sin, while her mother, played by none other than Cher, struggles to reconcile her dating life with the realities of motherhood and small-town gossip. Styled in a bouffant big enough to have its own gravitational pull, Cher steals every scene she waltzes into, but Ryder, with her nervous smile and fumbling awkwardness, makes an admirable foil, and together the two women construct an authentically charming two-hander about mother-daughter relationships at the dawn of women’s lib. (The cast is rounded out by Bob Hoskins, who applies his loveable hothead schtick to the role of Cher’s short king boyfriend, and making her film debut as Ryder’s younger sister is a pint-sized Christina Ricci, who would go on to develop her own version of a defiant female archetype through movies such as The Addams Family, Now & Then, The Opposite of Sex, and Prozac Nation.)
Mermaids is held together by Ryder’s diaristic voiceover, an internal monologue that exposes her character as naive and insecure, traits that the high-strung Charlotte, in typical teenage fashion, would rather keep to herself. Convinced that she’s pregnant after kissing her crush, Charlotte books an appointment at the family clinic, where she waits amongst a sea of single mothers and crying babies, her face contorted in disgust while reading a pamphlet emblazoned with a print that reads I am a woman giving birth to myself, the famous feminist slogan coined by artist and activist Marcia Salo Rizzi. When her doctor asks if she knows where babies come from, Charlotte nods confidently. (Voiceover: Please God I want to die.) “Then why did you think you were pregnant?” asks her doctor. “You’re still a virgin.” (Voiceover: I want to die now. Right now.) It’s in these moments that Ryder shines, her doe-eyes stunned when youthful hubris crashes against its context, which in this case includes limited sexual education and burgeoning access to the pill a few years shy of Roe V. Wade.
"To a child both precocious and weird, the actress loomed large, somewhere between role model and Platonic ideal."
Emerging from the same context but tonally much more serious, Girl, Interrupted stars Ryder as Susanna Kaysen, a recent high school graduate sent to live in a psychiatric facility in rural New England following a dubious aspirin overdose. Committed by her parents against her will, Susanna is forced to reckon with the misogyny both inside and outside the hospital alongside a gaggle of compatriots including Brittany Murphy, Elizabeth Moss, and Clea Duvall (her second time playing an institutionalized youth, if we consider RuPaul’s conversion camp in But I’m a Cheerleader, released that same year.) Other notable faces include Whoopi Goldberg as the ward’s head nurse, a woman forced to act as mammy to a group of mentally ill white women, and Jared Leto, who briefly appears as a disillusioned draft dodger in the most obvious fake beard I’ve ever seen. The movie’s standout performance belongs to Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for her role as Lisa Rowe, a diagnosed sociopath and Susanna’s psych ward bestie. Lisa arrives at the hospital in a long shearling coat, wrestling two cops on either arm. Susanna is immediately transfixed, and so are we. Remember when Angelina Jolie was an actor? It’s a shame she’s mostly left that behind because her on-screen charisma is a bigger contribution to humanity than any of her tax-deductible charity work.
As she did with Cher in Mermaids, Ryder complements Jolie’s powerhouse performance with something more subdued but no less compelling, resulting in an occasionally melodramatic but ultimately heartfelt portrait of young women caring for each other in a world that couldn’t care less. In one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, Lisa and Susanna steal a guitar and tambourine and sit outside solitary confinement, where one of their ward mates has been banished, and serenade the crying patient with an off-key rendition of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” Jolie’s rasp adding extra oomph to Ryder’s warble. I’ve watched this scene several times, and it never fails to make me cry.
"In a way, Susanna Kaysen is the role Ryder had been studying to play her whole career, a young woman told to behave a certain way or else."
In a way, Susanna Kaysen is the role Ryder had been studying to play her whole career, a young woman told to behave a certain way or else. In 2001, a little over a year after the release of Girl, Interrupted, the actress was arrested for shoplifting in Beverly Hills (among the designers she stole was Marc Jacobs, whose dress she would later wear to the hearing), a transgression she attributed to a period of poor mental health, exacerbated by painkillers prescribed to her by a doctor whose licence would later be revoked. The scandal triggered a lengthy hiatus from showbiz, a break from which her career has arguably never fully recovered. In an Esquire profile ahead of the recent Beetlejuice reboot, Ryder recalled the media circus that surrounded the incident, the snarky headlines and cruel press. “If you look at the period from 2000 to 2010,” she said, “it was the most degrading time to be a woman." A poignant pull quote, one that could work as a tagline for Mermaids, Girl, Interrupted, or pretty much anything in Ryder’s filmography, whether set in the ‘60s or the 1600s. Only a handful of movie stars are able to be both timeless and of their time, and Ryder is one of them. No matter the year, she’s Winona forever.