MERMAIDS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: While a comedy on the surface MERMAIDS
has a serious underside. Cher plays a mother whose
irresponsible self-indulgence is destroying the lives of her
family. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4).
Rachel Flax (played by Cher) has not handle responsibility well. On the surface she seems a likable kook with some odd ways of getting through life with minimal commitment. When life gets too hectic for her, she packs up and moves on, together with her two daughters. What she refuses to face is that she is hurting everyone around her and making both daughters incredibly neurotic. At first the viewer chuckles at the odd quirks of the family, but with time the chuckling becomes more uneasy and we get a feel for the painful contortions the Flax family is being put through by their mother's willful avoidance of any commitment. The movie is seen from 15- year-old daughter Charlotte's point of view as she desperately tries to understand her coming-of-age with no guidance whatsoever from her mother. (Charlotte is played by the ubiquitous Winona Ryder, who is currently in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS and WELCOME HOME, ROXY CARMICHAEL and is rumored to have had a nervous breakdown that prevented her from also being cast as Michael Corleone's daughter in THE GODFATHER III. Predictably she gets everything confused. One minute she wants to become a nun (though she is Jewish), she is fixated on Catholicism), and the next she is praying to be raped by the 26-year-old hunk who is the caretaker at a nearby convent.
Mrs. Flax is having her current affair with a Lou Landsky who owns the local shoe store "Foot Friendly." There are a couple of problems here, actually. "Foot Friendly" at least sounds like a take-off on the phrase "user-friendly," but MERMAIDS is set in 1963, before terminology like "X- friendly" was familiar or perhaps even invented. The second is that the script apparently calls for Lou to be Jewish and from the Midwest and the role is something of a stretch for actor Bob Hoskins. His character Lou realizes that behind all the weirdness there is a lot of pain in the Flax family. He wants to help but must tread a narrow line of helping the children and not scaring Rachel into "moving on."
Richard Benjamin directed, though a recent PBS discussion said that Cher was able to maintain much of the artistic control. The script's worst faults are its lulling the audience into believing the material would be light-weight, and a gratuitous piece of suspense toward the end that cheapens the effect of the film and makes it seem more manipulative where earlier it had been more sensitive. Still MERMAIDS has more to it than first meets the eye. I rate it a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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