Winona Ryder’s overacting the real mystery
The show: Stranger Things, Season 1, Episode 8 The moment: The acting mystery
Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) make their way through a spooky parallel universe (“the upside-down world”) in search of Joyce’s son Will, who’s been imprisoned by a creature. Joyce is hyperventilating.
“Hey, you all right?” Hopper asks her.
“Yeah,” she says. But she’s clearly not.
“I need you to relax, OK?” Hopper says. “I want you to slow down your breathing. Take deep breaths. In and out. Deep breath in and out. In, out.”
I binge-watched this series and really enjoyed it. (I wrote about it yesterday, too.)
It evokes, deliberately and well, the horror mysteries I grew up with in the 1970s and ’80s, like Halloween crossed with Scooby-Doo.
But there’s an unsolved mystery here: What is up with Ryder’s overacting? In every SCENE, she BUGS out her EYES and yells EVERY WORD, to show us that she’s a MOM who’s UPSET that her CHILD is MISS- ING. It’s not the directors’ fault; everyone else in the series is fine and the kid actors are hoots. I kept thinking, the showrunners must have a reason to let Ryder CHEW all that SCENERY. It must TIE IN to the PLOT.
Alas, NO. Could it be that in the real upside-down world — Hollywood — some actors are famous enough, or kooky enough, that they are un-directable? Do people try for a while, hissing into their headsets, and then simply minimize the damage and move on?
If Ryder returns for Season 2 ( just announced), I hope she takes Hopper’s advice: Relax, Winona. Breathe. Stranger Things streams on Netflix. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.