Plot
As adults, Benjamin "Benny" Pearl (Aidan Quinn) and his "ill" sister Juniper "Joon" Pearl (Mary Stuart Masterson), live together following the accidental death of their parents. Benny's friend Mike (Joe Grifasi) has his cinemaphile cousin Sam (Johnny Depp) staying with him. Joon joins Benny and Mike's poker game, and loses a bet that commits Sam to live with the Pearls. Benny is at first outraged, but after an evening with Sam at the local diner and then coming home the next day to find Sam has cleaned the house, Benny decides Sam should be Joon's "housekeeper" since her other housekeepers had been scared away by Joon's outbursts.
The next day, Joon aids an illiterate Sam when he is struggling with writing to his mom, and the two go to the local diner where Ruthie (Julianne Moore) is working. She takes them on errands, and then takes them home. After Ruthie stays for dinner, her car won't start, and Benny drives her home, where they set a dinner date. Meanwhile, left alone, Joon and Sam almost kiss. Benny and Ruthie have a fun date, but it ends abruptly because Benny wants to get home to Joon. The next day, Benny, Joon and Sam go to a park. Sam starts doing Keatonesque tricks with his hat, attracting an appreciative crowd. Benny tries to persuade Sam that he could do more with his life than be Joon's housekeeper. Benny heads to the park to reflect, and sends Joon home with Sam, where they make love; Sam tells Joon he loves her.
The next morning Sam asks for a job at the video store; Benny persuades a buddy to let Sam audition. When Benny suggests to Sam that he should make something of himself, Joon becomes agitated and makes Sam explain that he and Joon are romantically involved. Benny throws Sam out of the house, yells at Joon, and shows her a pamphlet about a group home that Dr. Garvey (CCH Pounder) thinks would be a better home for her. Joon starts hitting Benny and screaming, and he pushes her away. Feeling bad, Benny leaves to get her some tapioca. While away, Sam arrives. They pack suitcases and get on a bus, but Joon soon begins to hear voices and argue with them, in great distress. Sam tries to soothe her, but she continues to become more agitated. The bus is stopped, and two men with the ambulance service restrain Joon. When Benny arrives at the hospital, Dr. Garvey tells him Joon doesn't want to see him. He finds Sam in the waiting room, and they argue. Sam goes to stay with Ruthie, who is an apartment manager.
Benny finds Sam, now working at the video store and asks for his help. They go to the hospital. Benny persuades Joon to consider getting her own apartment and tries to convince her that Sam has come back for her. While being interviewed by Dr. Garvey, Joon sees Sam swinging on a platform outside her window and waving, and she states that she would like to try living in her own apartment. Dr. Garvey agrees to try out her choice. Benny and Joon reconcile, and Sam and Joon are reunited upon her release. At the end, Benny brings roses to Ruthie. He takes another bouquet upstairs to Joon's apartment but smiles and leaves the flowers in the doorway when he discovers Sam and Joon together contentedly making grilled cheese sandwiches with an iron.
Read more about this topic: Benny & Joon
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“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)