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| Images courtesy of Orion Pictures |
Patty Dean’s 1986 period coming-of-age novel Mermaids about
a neurotic fourteen-year-old teenage girl struggling to coexist with their
wayward mother in 1960s New England saw something of a shaky journey from text
to silver screen. Originally envisioned
as the English language debut of Swedish director Lasse Hallström before going
to work instead on Once Around, Frank Oz was hired as a replacement
before he too would leave the project over creative differences with Cher and
Winona Ryder. In their hands, the film
would’ve been closer to the source including a bleaker coda. But in hiring actor-turned-director Richard
Benjamin of My Stepmother is an Alien and All the Queen’s Men screenwriter
June Roberts adjusting the script to tailor the screen personas of Cher and
Winona Ryder, the film ends up being not quite what its producers initially
intended yet is nevertheless an entertaining romp somewhere between the
timeless quirk of Edward Scissorhands and the small town American
sixties landscape of Matinee.
Opening in 1963 Oklahoma, our story narrated by teenager Charlotte
Flax (Winona Ryder) living with her nine-year-old swimming class sister Kate (Christina
Ricci) consists of constantly being uprooted and relocated by their carefree
quirky thirty-one-year-old single mother Rachel (Cher) whenever a romantic
relationship sours. Between serving
meals consisting of junk food and getting into affairs with her employers, her
inability to properly parent either child results in unchecked growing
anxieties within Charlotte who is at once obsessed with Catholicism but also
yearns to be romantically spirited away by a knight in shining armor who
appears before her in the form of twenty-six year old convent caretaker Joe
Peretti (Michael Schoeffling).
All the while, Rachel meets a shoe store owner named Lou
Landsky (Bob Hoskins) and quickly forges romantic relations with him. As he warms up to her family, the
assassination of John F. Kennedy takes place, propelling the weepy Charlotte
and Joe into a kiss that all but stirs within her sinful thoughts of love as
she begins acting out in neurotic ways like convincing herself she’s pregnant
and stealing her mom’s car. As her anxieties
threaten to spiral out of control, there invariably comes a point in which this
troubled mother-daughter dynamic will come to a head, perhaps even with tragic
consequences.
A well intentioned coming-of-age drama whose intense characters
point towards something more despairing than what actually ended up onscreen
thanks to Cher in a film more tailored to the actress’ needs than the picture’s,
Mermaids doesn’t quite reach the heights of the text but at times it
comes close with committed performances by the three central leads who need no
introduction. Once Cher was cast,
considerable concessions were made to the actress including forcing production
to recast Emily Lloyd with Winona Ryder after the cameras already began
rolling, prompting a lawsuit against Orion Pictures for breach of contract
before reaching a settlement. Despite
some possible kowtowing not dissimilar from the ways also singer/actress
Barbara Streisand yielded power over her movies once on set, Cher and Winona
work together onscreen wonderfully including some tense sparring matches. Bob Hoskins as the good guy shoe shop owner
lends considerable dramatic weight to the picture while also being something of
a beacon for Cher’s difficult and dysfunctional single mother.
With painterly period cinematography by recurring Adrian
Lyne cameraman Howard Atherton and an upbeat but also affecting
when-it-needs-to-be score by renowned William Friedkin composer Jack Nitzsche,
the $20 million period drama became something of a runaway hit with critics and
audiences with around $35 million in ticket sales. Combined with a hit soundtrack album of
needle drops including a charts-topping cover track by Cher of The Shoop Shoop
Song (It’s in His Kiss) replete with its own music-video/movie tie-in promo,
Mermaids became a big score for Cher and particularly actress Winona
Ryder who both garnered a Golden Globe nomination as well as a National Board
of Review win for Best Supporting Actress.
Further still, Christinia Ricci won Best Supporting Actress at the Young
Artist Awards before embarking on an illustrious film career of her own.
Though the film may have missed the point of the text in
conceding to the needs of the two principal actresses, what’s here nevertheless
works as a mostly good film with good performances across the board as a quirky
yet clandestine period dramedy. Bob
Hoskins is an excellent anchor to this otherwise completely dysfunctional saga. Winona Ryder fresh off of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice
as well as Edward Scissorhands perhaps found with Mermaids her
perfect role as a troubled youth who never got the chance to properly forge
friendships and get to know communities or experience life due to her constant
upheaval by her mother. In a way you
could say the film is semi-autobiographical or close to home for both actresses
with Ryder’s intensity seemingly coming from a very real place while the aura
and persona around Cher inevitably reshaped the film drastically from what it
might’ve been had Hallström or Oz directed but what we have nevertheless still
has its unique if not nostalgic charms.
--Andrew Kotwicki
