Posted: 12/30/1999

Girl, Interrupted

(1999)

by Hank Yuloff

Why yes… it is another movie review. I see ‘em so you don’t have to.

“Have you ever confused a dream with life?”

The opening line of Girl, Interrupted. Welcome to Susanna’s nightmare. And her awakening from a dream that gives her a new look at life.

Winona Ryder plays Susanna: a girl with issues. A girl confused. A girl who is hurting herself on the outside to kill the thing on the inside. She is the only girl in her high school class who isn’t going on to college. She is the only girl in her high school class who swallows a bottle of aspirin with a vodka chaser. “I had a headache,” she tells a shrink. And it’s off to Claymore Hospital, a minimum security, high-end institution where she can “get some rest” and figure out why she wants to commit suicide. To stare into Ryder’s eyes is to understand the entire range of emotions Susanna is dealing with and trying at the same time to embrace and escape. She isn’t sure if she can trust what her mind is telling her—but she’s not sure she shouldnt.

Girl, Interrupted is based on writer Susanna Kaysen’s account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s. It is also a story of how any of us could take a wrong turn and lose our way in a world filled with hundreds of reasons to become mentally ill.

Ryder (Alien Resurrection, Reality Bites, Age of Innocence) executive produced this movie and had been trying to bring it to the screen for 6 years. “I’ve never been so passionate about a film.” To watch her performance, you can take her at her word. She is captivating. You feel her confusion and pain as she struggles to not just “get better” but first find out what is wrong with her. The diagnosis of “borderline personality disorder” seems to be just incomprehensible words to her… until the inner work is done.

Susanna has a problem with time skipping forward and back. We are taken on several of those flashbacks which help us find out how she got to the point of trying to take her life but settle eventually in a real time story line. The movie becomes the story of how the paths of Susanna and fellow patient Lisa (played by Angelina Jolie), though complementary, are growing quickly apart.

Jolie is the ward’s resident sociopath. The alpha female in a place filled with anything but alphas, Lisa is the ringleader that puts all the other girls on the ward through their paces. She has been there 8 years, has learned that “cheeking” her pills is the best way to keep “them” from “getting her,” and can seemingly break out whenever the need arises. One thing that confused me is that she has a set of keys to the ward. How did THAT happen? And how is it that they just never seem to get the fact that a lot of the girls are just “cheeking” their meds? Jolie will grab your attention and, like any good sociopath, will not let go of you. And as much as you want to break away from her, you will care what happens to her and want her to survive.

All the performances of the girls on the ward, are actually quite wonderful: Clea DuVall is Ryder’s compulsive liar roommate and Brittany Murphy plays an isolationist bulimic who’s problems run a lot deeper than food. As for the staff: Whoopi Goldberg is a wise and patient nurse who delivers compassion, discipline and medical attention as needed for the moment; Vanessa Redgrave plays the main shrink and though she is only in a couple of scenes, takes Susanna right to the heart of her problems (“What kind of sex isn’t casual?”). Jeffrey Tambor plays a ward doctor, but to be honest, I am having a hard time getting past the Hank Kingsley image I’ve had of him for many years on The Garry Shandling Show.

While this isn’t One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, director James Mangold (Copland) takes us inside a place I think most of us would be truly scared to take up residence, and that includes the place inside Susanna’s head. The result is a story that is captivating. He hasn’t done a lot of film work, but if this movie is any indication of the work yet to come, his work will only get better and better with time.

Hank Yuloff lives in Los Angeles, where he can be close to the heart of all that Hollywood madness.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com