Benny & Joon

"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.

The title characters are two young adults, Benny (Aidan Quinn) and his kid sister, known as Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson). He works to support them. She stays at home and paints, during her good periods, and rages at him, during her bad times. She is schizophrenic, although the screenplay doesn't ever say the word out loud. When she takes her medication and stays calm and things go smoothly, their lives are blessedly uneventful.

One of Benny's few pleasures is a monumental, long-running poker game, at which the stakes are all sorts of things other than money.

One night Joon loses a big bet, and is forced to provide temporary room and board for a strange, goofy relative of one of the other players. This is Sam (Johnny Depp), who is sane but lives in a strange blissful moonscape all his own.

The first time we see Sam, riding on the bus, he's reading a book about the silent clown Buster Keaton. This is not idle curiosity. Sam has somehow determined to internalize the genius of Keaton, Chaplin and the other early screen comedians, and although he never says that out loud, either, it becomes clear in a gradual, unforced way, as he incorporates bits from their films into his daily life.

If I had been reading the screenplay of "Benny and Joon," I would have started to form ominous misgivings at about this point, since the conceit of bringing a character like Sam into the story seems a little too precious. But Depp pulls it off. In "Edward Scissorhands" he demonstrated two of the skills that are crucial to his performance in "Benny and Joon": He was able to build an essentially wordless performance out of expression and gesture, and he had natural physical grace.

Here, without ever explaining himself, he simply behaves sometimes in the real world in the way Keaton and Chaplin behaved in their movie worlds.

There is a moment at a lunch counter, for example, when he sticks two forks into two dinner rolls, holds them under his chin, and moves them to suggest that the rolls are his feet, and he is dancing. It's a steal from "The Gold Rush," but done with an offhand charm that makes it work all over again.

Sam charms Joon out of her self-absorption, and before long, inevitably, they fall in love. But this is not a romance made in heaven, because neither Sam nor Joon is fitted with all the tools useful for surviving in the modern world.