Overall Rating
  Awesome: 32.91%
Worth A Look: 16.46%
Average: 39.24%
Pretty Bad: 6.96%
Total Crap: 4.43%
10 reviews, 98 user ratings
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| Girl, Interrupted |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Familiar but well-acted; worthwhile."
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Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir 'Girl, Interrupted' comes in at a lean, mean 169 pages; you could probably read it in less time than it takes to watch the movie version. Kaysen's terse little book, with its anecdotal, chronologically jumpy structure, doesn't seem like the stuff of a movie. There is one compelling reason to make a movie out of 'Girl, Interrupted,' though: meaty roles for an eager young female ensemble. On that level, and on several others, the movie triumphs.Girl, Interrupted begins in 1967, when the 18-year-old Susanna (Winona Ryder) is sent to a New England psychiatric hospital after an apparent suicide attempt -- swallowing fifty aspirin -- though she keeps insisting she wasn't trying to kill herself. Nor does she see herself as crazy, though she definitely knows she's miserable, and she has an odd preoccupation with patterns and a nagging fear that she has no bones in her hands. Given a nudge one way or the other, Susanna could turn out to be a highly original artist, seeing the world as no one else does, or a homeless person ranting in Harvard Square. Or both. But she's caught in that painful limbo where she doesn't know what she is -- a common malady of 18-year-olds of any gender or era, whether or not they are suicidal on top of it.
At Claymore Hospital, Susanna is tossed in among some genuinely disturbed girls: her roomie Georgina (Clea DuVall), a pathological liar; Polly (Elizabeth Moss), who burned her face off when she was ten; Daisy (Brittany Murphy), who's fixated on chicken and laxatives. The real star of Kaysen's narrative, though, isn't Susanna herself. It's Lisa (Angelina Jolie), a free-spirited sociopath who keeps escaping the hospital and being brought back in handcuffs. Lisa is presented as a kind of life force, an explosion of Technicolor in this gray place; she represents everything Susanna wishes she could be, though there's more to Lisa than meets the eye.
For much of her screen time, Winona Ryder (who nurtured this project over a long development period and served as a producer) plays straight woman to Angelina Jolie; she simply sits back and gives the movie to Jolie without a struggle. Lisa is probably any young actress's dream role, and Jolie tears into it with sharp talons -- unafraid to seem unsympathetic, yet keeping our sympathies anyway, because even when Lisa is monstrous (her response to a tragedy late in the movie chills the blood), Jolie shows us the pain behind it. Lisa has developed such thick skin against suffering -- her own and others' -- that some part of her has shut down. What's left is a grinning mask that plays up to society's perception of her.
Director James Mangold (Heavy, Cop Land), who worked on the script with Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan, tries to put some beef on Kaysen's lean narrative. Some of it comes off as flab, as when some of the girls get together for an after-hours game of bowling. Generally, though, Mangold has quiet, subtle control of this highly emotional material; as he showed in his previous films, he has a fine feel for defeated, depressed characters -- secret societies of outcasts or misfits.
The emotional highs and lows in Girl, Interrupted are honestly earned. This isn't a nobility-of-the-insane piece, or a triumph-of-the-human-spirit fable. It's just the story of one girl and the other wounded girls she spent 18 months with. And the moviemakers give the story a classical shape -- and a double meaning for the title -- that Kaysen's memoir didn't have. In the book, Lisa wasn't used as a cautionary figure; Kaysen described running into a happier, healthier Lisa (who'd had a son) years later. In the movie, we see that Susanna wasn't only interrupted in her life; she was, as Kaysen points out, flirting with madness, and the movie's Lisa represents what Susanna no longer wants to become.Susanna is interrupted on her way to being Lisa; at the end, we feel, she's begun to figure out how to be herself.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1814&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/24/07 11:02:18
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USA
21-Dec-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
20-Jan-2000
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