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In early 1994, Entertainment Weekly hosted a roundtable discussion on the paucity of movie roles available for serious female actors. The panel included Glenn Close. And Meryl Streep. And Winona Ryder.
And Winona Ryder.
Clearly, the magazine's editors had, at that point, been so bedazzled by Ms. Ryder's work in The House of the Spirits, Great Balls of Fire! and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael that they concluded that no panel of Serious Female Actors would be complete without her input. Or, more likely, they had been stricken by that viral strain that's especially common among certain Hollywood directors, and which causes the victim to see, in a young actor, an abundance of acting talent that is, mysteriously, hidden to the general public. We'll call it Keanuitis.
Let's get one thing straight: Winona Ryder has been in a lot of good movies. She's just never been the best thing about any of them. This proclivity was perhaps never better illustrated than in Girl, Interrupted -- or, as we here at Fametracker refer to it, Girl, Usurped -- for which Winona's co-star, Angelina Jolie, nabbed an Oscar, which she presumably stashed with several other things she'd stolen recently, like, say, the movie itself.
But even when you look back over the span of Ms. Ryder's career, you see a lot of fondly remembered films -- Beetlejuice, Heathers, Edward Scissorhands...um, er, Lucas -- that she herself didn't have a whole lot to do with making memorable. Afer the launching pad of Beetlejuice (in which her chocolate-dollar eyes and just-shaking-off-the-last-of-the-ether facial expression were actually a perfect foil for Michael Keaton's carny-gone-wrong antics), Ms. Ryder's career, for a good decade or so, consisted of two different kinds of movies: little-girl-lost teen angst films (Heathers, Reality Bites, How to Make an American Quilt), most of which were okay or good, and Period Pieces (Dracula, The Age of Innocence, The House of the Spirits) all of which were uniformly unwatchable, largely because several of them featured her attempting some foreign accent or other, and ending up sounding like she's following along with a Teach Yourself Spanish record.
Still, she might have cruised along indefinitely as Hollywood's favourite Fine Young Actress/Serial Starhumper, had not a few misguided directors tried to add a new arrow to Ryder's quiver of standard roles: the Heartstopper. In both Woody Allen's Celebrity and Joan Chen's Autumn in New York, Ms. Ryder is cast as the gal for whom a serial womanizer gladly renounces his caddish ways.
Now, we've always thought that Ms. Ryder's fresh-scrubbed, cherubic, and vaguely preadolescent good looks perfectly suited her for the lead in the world's most expensive remake of that afterschool special in which the best boy on the baseball team turns out to be a girl all along! But we understand that there are sane and good people in the world for whom her particular brand of pixie-ish nose-scrunches are just the tonic. And the implausibility of her as a Heartstopper isn't really about looks, anyway. It's about allure. And, frankly, the scene in Autumn in New York in which Richard Gere stops dead in his tracks, mesmerized by his first glimspe of a candlelit Winona Ryder, feels about as believable as the prospect of Isabella Rossellini dropping her fork in Big Night upon spotting a just-uncovered dish of creamed corn.
We don't wish Ms. Ryder ill. We'd be more than happy to see her return to her roots as the not bad thing in good movies (as she was in, say, Little Women). We just wanted to nip this Heartstopper thing in the bud. And while we have your attention: When casting a twenty-eight-year-old to play the love interest for a fifty-year-old, maybe don't cast one who looks fourteen. Also: She can't do accents. Don't ask her, and don't let her. Also: She belongs on no roundtables with Meryl Streep, unless the subject of the roundtable is "Meryl Streep and Some Other People Who Aren't as Talented as She Is."
We understand that fans of Ms. Ryder will argue that she (a) possesses a kind of winsome charm, and that (b) this qualifies her as some sort of latter-day Audrey Hepburn. As for the second contention, we haven't seen too many Audrey Hepbrun films, but the late Ms. Hepburn mustered more charm during her cameo in Always than Winona Ryder has in her whole IMDb résumé. As for the first, we can only say (or, rather, can't restrain ourselves from saying): Winona, you're winsome, you lose some.
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