Benny & Joon is a 1993 romantic comedy about how two misfits, Sam (Johnny Depp) and Juniper/Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), find each other and fall in love.
In a small town, an auto mechanic named Benny is devoted to taking care of his mentally ill sister, Joon, who can barely function alone in the real world despite being a talented artist. This relatively stable situation is shaken up when Benny is obliged in a poker game to welcome another player's relative, Sam, to his home for a few days. When Sam arrives, he quickly makes an impression with his quietly eccentric ways which emulate the antics of the great silent movie comedian, Buster Keaton. Without Benny's full knowledge, Sam and Joon find themselves drawn to each other to the fullest degree.
The movie is full of absurdist fripperies we're meant to find magically funny; mostly they're just cute (Sam cooking up grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron, a poker game in which a snorkel mask and baseball tickets are used as stakes). Beneath the domesticated surrealism, though, Benny & Joon becomes genuinely touching-a love story about separation anxiety. Benny, the saintly grease monkey, thinks he has to devote his life to Joon in order to keep her out of an institution. Can he give her the space she needs to fall in love (and then take said space for himself)? You already know the answer, but Quinn and Masterson-now gentle, now sniping-let it play out with tender conviction. Though hemmed in by the sentimental conception of her role, Masterson, in one or two scenes, comes close to making mental instability seem like a state of grace. And Quinn has the charisma of goodness: His bright, aw- shucks smile is as honest as Jimmy Stewart's. Inconsequential as it is, Benny & Joon is that rare thing, a crazy-versus-sane movie that likes one kind as much as the other.
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