Girl, Interrupted (1999)

reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten


GIRL INTERRUPTED

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Columbia Pictures Director: James Mangold Writer: James Mangold and Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan, book by Susanna Kaysen Cast: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Bittany Murphy, Clea DuVall, Vanessa Redgrave, Whoopi Goldberg

"Girl, Interrupted" comes out at an opportune moment. The NY Times of Dec. 13 reports in its lead story that one out of every five Americans will suffer a mental disturbance in any given year and that two-thirds of those people will never seek help for their problems. A major reason for this passivity is the belief that emotional problems are a sign of weakness. Yet decades ago, Freud and others had established that mind and body are interconnected; that an emotional difficulty is no more shameful than a physical handicap. What many still do not realize is that someone with such an impairment cannot simply "snap out of it" any more than a guy with a fractured ankle can simply get up and walk.

Movies that have exploited such emotional difficulties have often shown that the cure is worse than the disease. Anatole Litvak's "The Snake Pit," made 51 years ago featuring an electrifying performance by Olivia de Haviland, was one of the first films to deal intelligently with mental breakdowns, while Milos Forman's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" back in '75 featureed Jack Nicholson as a feisty misfit not unlike one of the female characters in "Girl, Interrupted," who pushes his fellow inmates to assert themselves against a tyrannical nurse.

"Girl, Interrupted" is dramatized from a true-life experience of novelist Susanna Kaysen, whose best-seller by the same name dealt with her episode in a private mental hospital during the flamboyant era of the late '60s. While director James Mangold's adaptation written together with Anna Hamilton Phelan and Lisa Loomer depicts the staff of the hospital (filmed in an actual institution in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) as competent and rational, the film broadly hints that some of the patients do not really belong there--that they would not be dangerous if released and treated as out- patients. On the other hand, one inmate was obviously released too early. She committed suicide at home soon thereafter.

The author, Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) was the product of an upper-middle class household, the only student in her elite school without plans to go to college. While her classmates were accepted into Radcliffe and Wellesley, Susanna was dazed and confused, knowing only that she wanted to be a writer. (In one of the movie's only humorous moments, Susanna tells a caseworker of her ambition to write, to which the latter asks, "Yes, but what will you do?") When her psychiatrist diagnoses her as having Borderline Personal Disorder, she all-too-quickly goes along with his judgment and, being 18 years of age, checks herself into a hospital. It is there, at Claymoore, that she finds the best friends she ever had, including Lisa (Angelina Jolie), a free- spirited young woman who says whatever comes to mind and has a heart of stone; Daisy (Brittany Murphy), who has had an unhealthy relationship with her dad and is addicted to rotisserie chicken and laxatives; Polly (Elisabeth Moss), who is the kindest woman in her circle but has been facially disfigured in a fire; and her roommate, Georgina (Clea Duvall), who seems pretty normal to me.

Though quite well acted particularly by Winona Ryder as the author's stand-in, "Girl, Interrupted"--which gets its title from a Vermeer painting in New York's Frick Museum to which Susanna's English teacher introduced her--has a wholly predictable trajectory and is therefore only mildly winning. The book's frequent ironic passages appear absent from this basic TV fare, which includes the expected reaction of disbelief and displeasure from Susanna's bourgeois parents; disgust and hostility from Mrs. Gilcrest (Mary Kay Place), the wife of the English teacher with whom Susanna had a brief affair; an equally brief sexual interlude with the strikingly handsome Tobias Jacobs (Jared Leto), who is about to escape the Vietnam draft by fleeing to Canada; and the frequent interventions by the hospital staff whenever a patient--particularly the fiery Lisa--would lose control.

Mangold covers the rooms of the psychiatric hospital displaying a laundry list of types rather than drawn-out characters, and treats the staff in a similar manner--the no- nonsense nurse, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg); the ivory-tower head psychiatrist Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), and the somewhat laughable Dr. Melvin Potts (Jeffrey Tambor)--all of whom say exactly what you'd expect such professionals to remark.

On a philosophical note, the story also covers the usual sophomoric grounds: What's normal and what's irrational? Susanna is labeled promiscuous, but shoots back at Dr. Wick, "How many girls would a 17-year-old boy have to screw to earn the label 'compulsively promiscuous'?" We are led to believe that what really shakes Susanna out of her doldrums is not the professional treatment she receives but the camaraderie she enjoys with the other young women on the floor, particularly her acting as mentor to the erratic Lisa, a role that Angelina Jolie takes over in one scene-stealer after another.

Aside from a quick look at a drug party that the girls attend after a brief escape from the hospital and a soundtrack of sixties music, there is little to signify that the story is taking place during the flamboyant sixties, a period that would encourage some to comment that the whole country was crazier than most of the so-called loonies in the psychiatric centers.

Rated R. Running Time: 127 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com


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