Mermaids: Noni Makes a Splash

The lemon meringue at
Bayside is
sensuous!

Yesterday was a perfect day to stream  Mermaids, which had been in our queue for re-viewing for some while. We had been to the Bayside Restaurant in Westport. It is one of our favorite restaurants, not only for the great food, the seaside location, and the connections to local sustainable agriculture, but also because of the prevalence of nautical beauties in its graphics and decor. (The related matter of mermaid connections to coffee is covered on James' Environmental Geography blog.)

Set in the early 1960s, this movie is a true gem from Our Winona's golden age of teen angst. Jewish Charlotte Flax (Ryder) is a wanna-be self-flagellating Catholic who must figure out how to live with her eccentric, single mother (Cher), to whom she affectionately refers as Mrs. Flax. A young Christina Ricci plays her precocious little sister, Kate. Pam used the word "precocious" for Ricci's character; James found that her IMDb biography starts with the same word. This was Ricci's first film, and nearly her last as a "little" girl.

Mrs. Flax has a habit of uprooting her family every time she breaks up with a boyfriend. As the film begins she is leaving the boyfriend/boss/creep de jure, and she puts the old random-finger-on-a-map trick to dramatic use in finding the family's next refuge. It is from this scene that we learn Charlotte and Kate will find themselves starting over in the fictitious town of Eastport, Massachusetts, and that this town seems to be near our adopted hometown of Bridgewater. See our Bridgewaters Project blog post for more on the geography of this film.

It is in this little town that Charlotte falls in love for the first time, finds out that she can't get pregnant from kissing, and learns an important lesson in what it means to be a grown up. In many ways this is a predictable coming-of-age film, but the three mermaids of the home -- one a woman, one a girl, and one caught in between -- are played with unusual depth. Their many foibles -- and even the tension between mother and eldest daughter -- make them both sympathetic characters and a joy to spend time with. The viewer can really get the feeling of sitting on the edge of the kitchen, hoping that this small family will find its way.

A note about the fourth-wheel character: Just as Christian Slater was channeling Jack Nicholson as he played opposite Our Noni in the Greatest Film of All Time, so did Bob Hoskins tend to have studied Danny DeVito a little too closely for his role as Mrs. Flax's first non-cretin beau. In Hoskin's case, though, he did not overdo it, and his performance serves to round out the film.

This was a fun film with a great sound track of some of the period's most enjoyable music. Listen through the credits to hear Cher herself cover a Betty Everett track played during the film itself.

Final verdict: four croquet balls.
And yes: 15,000 IMDb users can be wrong. Their equivalent of a three-ball rating, but they just do not understand what Our Noni has done here.