Mermaids (1990)

Mermaids arrives from 1990, a year when a coming-of-age comedy could still concern a girl, her mother, a bell tower, and the assassination of a president, with no thesis appended. Richard Benjamin directs this adaptation of Patty Dann's novel with a light hand. Winona Ryder plays Charlotte Flax, fifteen and anxious, obsessed with Catholicism in a way her Jewish, irreligious mother finds exhausting. Cher plays that mother, Rachel, who relocates her daughters whenever a romance sours. They land in a small Massachusetts town. Charlotte falls for the bus driver. Rachel takes up with the shoe salesman. A bell gets rung. Kennedy is shot. Life continues.

The film's cultural footprint is modest and its social agenda smaller still. The cast is uniformly white, and the story unfolds without a gesture toward race, class, sexuality, or the environment. Charlotte's adolescent turmoil, her fasting and her fear of divine punishment, reads as period-specific angst, not as a coded statement about mental health. What the film does offer is a portrait of women steering their own lives. Rachel declines a marriage proposal because the man asking is still legally married, and the refusal lands with no speech attached. That is a small autonomy, granted quietly, and it is the nearest the film comes to a position.

The tone throughout is wry observation. Characters are watched, not instructed. A gynecological exam is played for comedy. A near-drowning is resolved by nuns. The film shows no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it, which in the present climate reads as a kind of antique restraint. It is gentle, uneven, and content to leave its lessons unspoken. We are left with Ryder's performance and a mother who dresses as a mermaid on New Year's Eve. That is the whole of it.