After I saw Alien4 I developed a rather odd fixation on Winona Ryder. I read a great many of the articles at The Winona Ryder Site, looked at all of the pictures, downloaded sound and movie clips. A while back I collected 8 of her movies from friends or video stores... I spent a weekend having my own personal WinonaFest. I watched Heathers, Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael, Mermaids, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Little Women, How to Make an American Quilt, and The Crucible. (I also had a copy of The Age of Innocence but the recording quality was poor so I didn't watch it) I had previously seen Lucas, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Reality Bites.
It was an interesting process collecting these movies. The majority I had never heard of, and of the ones I had already seen I didn't realize she was in them.
Since then I have finished reading every article offered at The Winona Ryder Site (sans the ones in french, I scanned a few of the german articles until I realized they were just reprints of other articles) What have I learned from all this?
Her movies, so far, fall into two basic categories: 1) Those the mimic some facet of her life or 2) Those that are movie she's wanted to do since childhood.
Those falling into category one are: 1) Lucas, the story of a "loner turned cheerleader," 2) Beetlejuice, a great deal of the costuming for that movie came from her personal wordrobe, if that tells you anything, 3) Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael, story of an estranged girl ostracized by her small rural town (sound anything like Petaluma?), 4) 1969, she's a hippie, like her parents are purported to be, 5) How to Make an American Quilt, the child of hippies since grown up. Though I have not yet seen Square Dance or Night on Earth I place them in category one as well based on what I have read of their plot summaries.
Category two is made up of the many "period pieces" based on books; books I have assumed she read in her childhood and enjoyed such as The Age of Innocence, Dracula, The Crucible, etc. Another tossed into this category is Alien4 as she "worshiped" the character of Ripley and had always wanted to do an Alien movie.
My overall conclusion is to question how much acting ability she truly controls. Certainly I've never had the chance to watch her in action. (Teehee, aren't puns pathetic?) Ceratinly I'd love to have her prove me wrong. (logic would require that I'd have to be allowed to be present on set, a mere video wouldn't cut it... If you think I'm wrong now you must agree that videos can be misleading, no?) If I had to use one word to describe her choices in movies I'd have to say "lazy." She had the chance to rehearse her parts since birth, or since when she read them for the first time. Her method of choosing scripts on "instinct" betrays that she identifies with the character. Why does she identify? because, so very often it seems, they're her.
I hate to have to psycho-analyze someone based on diluted movie characterizations and superficial magazine articles but it is all I have available to me. I might get back to this later...