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20 Essential Winona Ryder Roles, Ranked
There’s so much more to the Gen-X icon than her ability to deadpan and how great she looks in choppy bangs.
Girl, Interrupted leans a little too much on all of the other committed women having noticeable quirks or defining traumas (Susanna’s is the promiscuity caused by her borderline personality disorder), but Ryder is solid as a woman yearning to be liked and to belong to other people, and her performance blooms against those of Jolie, Brittany Murphy, Clea DuVall, and Elisabeth Moss. Her gentle wisdom and unbothered love for Spock help soften Quinto’s super-constrained version of the character — like when she fusses with his uniform collar before his emotion-purge ritual and tells him whatever he chooses, “you will have a proud mother” — and Ryder plays her with such poise and dignity that her tragic death is probably the most impactful moment of that whole trilogy. The Age of Innocence is primarily about a love triangle between wealthy New York City lawyer Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), his younger, seemingly naïve and vacuous fiancée, May Welland (Ryder), and her more worldly, sophisticated, unconventional older cousin Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), but the film — as with all of Scorsese’s work — quickly becomes an allegory for the American experience at large, about how the strictness of social conventions and public propriety stifle the individual.
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