Girl, Interrupted
*
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Columbia TriStar on 24 March, 2000; certificate 15;
125 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 1.85:1
Directed by James Mangold; produced by
Cathy Konrad, Douglas Wick.
Written by Lisa Loomer, James Mangold, Anna Hamilton
Phelan; based on the book by Susanna Kaysen.
Photographed by Jack Green; edited by Kevin
Tent.
CAST.....
Winona Ryder..... Susanna
Angelina Jolie..... Lisa
Clea Duvall..... Georgina
Brittany Murphy..... Daisy
Elisabeth Moss..... Polly
Jared Leto..... Tobias Jacobs
Whoopi Goldberg..... Valerie
Jeffrey Tambor..... Dr. Potts
Vanessa Redgrave..... Dr. Wick
"Girl, Interrupted" argues that
mental institutions keep the sane and release the unstable, because of stuffy
procedures and restrictive rules written by bureaucratic doctors disconnected
from reality. While I am sure these things are true, the film never makes
us care, because its heroine is a bitchy little nut-job.
"Haven't you ever confused a dream with reality,
stolen something when you had the cash, or thought your train moving as it
sat in the station?" she pleads with us in the opening scenes. But that's
not the kind of behaviour she's being locked up for. This is a young lady
who responds "What?" whenever anyone asks her a question, drifts into daydreaming
in the middle of sentences and thinks it's perfectly acceptable to guzzle
great quantities of pills and vodka.
Her name is Susanna Kaysen, a real-life figure
whose book this movie is based on. If the film is anything to go by, I'm
lucky that I never read it. "Girl, Interrupted" is a pathetic example of
someone denying she's in denial; it's as self-obsessed as Sylvia Plath's
"The Bell Jar" without the engaging style. There are journal entries in the
film we're supposed to accept as profound philosophising. Most of them are
just the kind of pretentious stream-of-consciousness drivel that many teenage
girls write, only to look back on years later and cringe with
embarrassment.
The story is set in the 1960s -- boys are being
shipped to their deaths in Vietnam, and Susanna (Winona Ryder) thinks she's
got a hard life because her mother is hassling her about going to college.
After a suicide attempt, she is encouraged to sign herself into Claymoore,
an expensive mental hospital where the head nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) gives
a straightforwardly accurate diagnosis: "You are a lazy, self-indulgent little
girl who is driving herself crazy."
Susanna does a lot of mellow lying around, drunk
on her own superiority, convinced she's "artistic" rather than crazy. Fellow
inmate Lisa (Angelina Jolie) offers her support, probably because the two
women have the same problem -- thinking they know the secrets of the universe,
when they're actually defective jerks. Other friendly faces include a
pathological liar (Clea Duvall) and a girl who likes to set herself on fire
(Elisabeth Moss). Anyone in a position of authority, or who displays the
least bit of conventionality, is portrayed as an uptight white-collar
conservative square. I am reminded of "Reality Bites" (1994), another film
starring Ryder in which the alleged heroes were self-obsessed layabout
losers.
"Girl, Interrupted" is moronic and arrogant crap,
not least because its obnoxious onscreen behaviour is accompanied by a voice-over
that asks, essentially, "Can you believe these stuffed shirts thought
I was obnoxious?" Perhaps the book or true events would lead me to a different
conclusion, but the Susanna Kaysen of this film could use a good hard slap
in the face.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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