Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are hosting Comfy, Cozy Cinema again this year and first up on our movie-watching list was Benny & Joon.

Benny & Joon (1993)is a quirky film I watched in 1990s and really enjoyed. It was when I first saw Johnny Depp because I never watched 21 Jump Street or anything else he was in back then.

I already knew Mary Stuart Masterson from Fried Green Tomatoes.

For the most part, the movie is funny, comfy, and sweet, but there are a couple of hard moments. In the end, though, (small spoiler ahead —–à) things actually turn out okay.

Let’s start with an online description of the movie:

Benny (Aidan Quinn), who cares for his mentally disturbed sister, Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), also welcomes the eccentric Sam (Johnny Depp) into his home at Joon’s request. Sam entertains Joon while he dreams of a job at the video store. Once Benny realizes Joon and Sam have started a relationship, he kicks Sam out of the house. This leads to an altercation between brother and sister. Joon runs away with Sam, who soon realizes that she may need more support than he alone can provide.


This movie starts with someone painting and a train rolling across the tracks to the soundtrack of The Proclaimers singing I’m Gonna Be (500 miles). Yes, that very annoying song that is an earworm and was overplayed in 1993. Okay, it’s not actually annoying. I like it! But it won’t get out of my head once I’ve heard it. And I mean for more than a week!

Anyhow, back to the movie.

After we see a woman painting we are at Benny’s Car Clinic where we see Benny (Aiden Quinn) fixing a car and chatting with his friends when a call is made from his home. His sister Joon wants him to know that they are out of peanut butter Crunch cereal.

Later at Benny’s home we meet Joon who seem a little different but otherwise fairly sane and smart.

She’s clearly very intelligent with the way she uses large phrases and big words. Still, she also seems somewhat childlike.

As the movie goes on we will lean that Joon has mental issues and sometimes likes to light things on fire.

She rarely leaves the house alone, instead staying in the house and painting. Housekeepers take care of her during the day but on this day one of them, apparently one of many, is calling it quits.

Joon is out of control she tells Benny. That means Benny is without someone to sit with Joon during the day and he’ll have to miss his card game with his friends that night because Joon can’t be left home alone very much.

His friend, Eric (Oliver Platt), tells him just to bring Joon, but Benny hesitates.

“What’s the big deal?”Eric says. “She paints and she reads.”

“Yeah, she paints. She reads. She lights things on fire,” Benny responds.

As my Mom would say, “Oh. Oh. My.”

Once at the game, though, Joon does fairly well, even if she does like holding her hand over the flame of a candle a bit too much..

We learn that Benny’s friends place real items in the pot for their poker game and this will come into play later in the movie when Joon decides to play a round while Benny is outside and Benny’s friend Mike says if she loses the hand she has to take his eccentric cousin off his hands.

That cousin is a 26-year-old name Sam (Johnny Depp) who can’t read or write and doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. He likes Buster Keaton and has been studying him, though, dressing like  him and taking on his persona while being generally …. Weird.

 At first Benny says he won’t take Sam but then he agrees and over time Sam becomes the housekeeper and a whole lot more to Joon who falls hard for him.

Before all of this, though, Joon’s doctor suggests that Benny have Joon placed in a group home where she will be among her peers.

Benny laughs. “She has a home.” Not only that but, “She hates her peers.”

The doctor sighs. “You might want to consider there are people more capable of handling these outbursts than you.”

Benny rejects this idea over and over again even though his whole life is put on hold so he can care for Joon. He doesn’t have a love life or any life outside of work.

There will come a time, though, when it does have to be seriously considered. I won’t give away anymore than all of this because this movie is worth a watch. It is actually sweet and when you think it is going some place you don’t want it to, it will change directions and pleasantly surprise you.

Don’t let the dark music that sometimes pops up scare you.

Mixed in with all the drama with Joon, by the way, is a potential romance between Benny and Ruthie, a local waitress who used to be in B-movies.

This movie  has always charmed me. It’s made me laugh, smile, and enchanted me. I’m a big sucker for quirky movies with quirky characters.

As I watched the movie this time around (maybe my fifth time watching it), I realized that I think I am attracted to this movie because my great-aunt was schizophrenic and an artist. Maybe I saw some of her in Joon, even though I never met her. Mental illness has always frightened me. My great-aunt was sent to a mental hospital when she was in her 40s after years of acting odd. From what I understand she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and I always wondered if it might happen to me too. I liked art and I was even a little odd at times. Ha! So far I’m just depressed and have anxiety. No schizophrenia.

I should clarify that this movie never defines what Joon has but many viewers suspect a combination of conditions, including schizophrenia.

There are several classic scenes in this movie for me.

One is when Sam uses forks to make buns dance:

The other is when Sam reenacts Ruthie’s horrible acting in the B-movie (which can also be seen at the above clip)

Another is the absolute look of delight Sam gets when Benny says Joon sometimes hears voices in her head. That makes me crack up every time. It’s like he thinks the idea of her hearing voices is absolutely delightful.

Then there is Sam making grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron.

Then there is also a scene toward the end of the movie that you will have to see — you’ll know what it is when you see it.

There are also so many good quotes that come from either Joon or Sam too

When Sam is staring at Joon at one point she says, “Having a Boo Radley moment are we?”

As a huge fan of To Kill A Mockingbird, that one always cracks me up.

Later when she and Benny watch Sam make the grilled cheese sandwiches she says, “Some cultures are defined by their relationship to cheese.”

In the restaurant one day Joon picks the raisins out of her tapioca pudding and Sam asks her why she doesn’t like raisins.

“They used to be fat and juicy and now they’re twisted,” she says. “They had their lives stolen. Well, they taste sweet, but really they’re just humiliated grapes. I can’t say I am a big supporter of the raisin council.”

He then asks her if she saw those dancing raisins on TV and she says they scare her. That always cracks me up because they used to scare me too!

Some Trivia and Facts

I always wondered this so I looked it up and Johnny does do his own stunts and tricks when imitating Buster Keaton. This does not surprise me in the least.

Apparently, Wynonna Ryder was going to play Joon but she had Johnny had been dating at the time and broke up so she dropped out. I think I could actually see her playing Joon, even though Mary Stuart Masterson did great.

Johnny improvised a scene where he tasted the paint of one of Joon’s paintings. This also doesn’t surprise me.

From IMdb: “During the filming of the scene where Benny rushes to Joon’s aid after she is put into an ambulance, a house party was happening less than a block away from the shooting in Spokane’s Peaceful Valley area (it was a day scene actually filmed at night). After hours of re-takes, Jeremiah S. Chechik bribed the local revelers with a cornucopia of food from the crew’s food tent, which kept them pacified long enough to finish the scene (at around midnight).”

Though released in the UK and Australia in 1988, the song I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) was not well-known in the United States until this movie. Once it was in the movie it reached number three on the Billboard Charts in the U.S. and was played ad nauseum until many people, such as me, were sick of hearing it. (Again, I do like the song. It was just overplayed that year.)

Another tidbit directly quoted from IMbD: “In the restaurant scene between Sam and Joon, as they are discussing raisins, Sam says, “It’s a shame about raisins.” This is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the video for the Lemonhead’s hit, “It’s a Shame about Ray,” which was released the year before and in which Johnny Depp starred. (At the end of the video, Johnny can be seen carrying a curved cane almost identical to Sam’s.)”

Of the film, Rogert Ebert (a famous movie critic back  in the day) said, “Benny and Joon” is a film that approaches its subjects so gingerly it almost seems afraid to touch them. The story wants to be about love, but is also about madness, and somehow it weaves the two together with a charm that would probably not be quite so easy in real life.”

For once, he actually liked a film I liked and ended his review with this: ““Benny and Joon” is a tough sell. Younger moviegoers these days seem to shy away from complexities, which is why the movie and its advertising all shy away from any implication of mental illness. The film is being sold as an offbeat romance between a couple of lovable kooks. I was relieved to discover it was about so much more than that.”

Have you ever seen this one? What did you think if you did?

You can read Erin’s impressions of the movie here.

Up next in our Comfy, Cozy Cinema is: A Knight’s Tale.

You can see the rest of the list of movies in this cool graphic that Erin made: