Team Experience is celebrating Winona Ryder this week for her 50th birthday
by Timothy Lyons
1994 was a watershed year for a young Winona Ryder. It started with her first Oscar nomination (and a Golden Globe win) for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and would come to a close with the Christmas release of Gillian Armstrong’s superior adaptation of Little Women with Ryder’s performance as Jo leading to her second Oscar nomination in as many years (more on that tomorrow). Sandwiched between this diptych of heavily-costumed prestige pics was the release of Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites. Here was a film that would come to define a generation (Generation X) and featured the best, most natural, and luminescent performance of Ryder’s career.
I am a huge Winona Ryder fan - let me get that out of the way before we go further. She does however have a tendency towards the fidgety, the strangely mannered and vaguely uneasy in her performances. Sometimes this can lead to her work feeling slightly blank or disengaged, but more often than not (especially when called upon to play one of many outsiders) it is just right...
All this is to say that as big a Winona fan as I am, I know that the role has to fit - a chameleon she is not. Happily the marriage between actress and character has never been more magic than it was with Winona & Lelaina Pierce.
Ryder’s nervous energy fits so well with the natural discomfort of the role of fringe-dweller on the precipice that it’s almost as if she felt freed by the experience. Surely there were parallels felt in the actor’s own transition between child performer and serious actress that lent itself to Lelaina’s own experience. Equally, unencumbered by period finery and genre trappings, she has never felt looser or more engaged onscreen - there are times where she truly feels lit from within. This is not to discredit her director and amazing screen partners (never better Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn and Ethan Hawke) who I’m certain went a long way towards pulling out this amazing work, but the performance still feels defiantly Ryder’s own creation. And what a creation - however it got there.
There is really not much I can add about my personal experience with this classic film that hasn’t already been said. Apart from evoking in me as much nostalgia for the early-to-mid 90s as a re-reading of Alex Garland’s The Beach, or blasting either Nirvana or The Cranberries, Reality Bites also brings to light like few other films that transitory period between the idealist rebelliousness of young adulthood and the sudden need to ‘get real’ and make some serious moves. I myself have definitely felt that pressure to build a future while also trying to maintain a hold onto my passions and ideals.
Despite being definitively of an era, Reality Bites is a timeless and sneakily powerful tale of youth in revolt and this is in great part thanks to Winona Ryder’s magnetic central performance. A performance that deserves to be mentioned alongside her most recognised work and as much as I love her interpretation of Louisa May Alcott’s iconic heroine, probably should have been the one to net her that Best Actress nod for 1994.
previously on Winona @ 50
Beetlejuice
Heathers
Mermaids
Age of Innocence
up next
Little Women