Girl, Interrupted (1999)

User Rating:

7.1/10   

Director:

James Mangold

Writers (WGA):

Susanna Kaysen (book)
James Mangold (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

14 January 2000 (USA)

Genre:

Biography | Drama

Tagline:

Based on a true story

Plot:

Based on writer Susanna Kaysen's account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s.

Plot Keywords:

1960s | Suicide | Suicide Attempt | Doctor | Nurse

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 4 wins & 8 nominations

Cast

Winona Ryder	...	Susanna Kaysen
Angelina Jolie	...	Lisa Rowe
Clea DuVall	...	Georgina Tuskin (as Clea Duvall)
Brittany Murphy	...	Daisy Randone
Elisabeth Moss	...	Polly 'Torch' Clark
Jared Leto	...	Tobias 'Toby' Jacobs
Jeffrey Tambor	...	Dr. Melvin Potts
Vanessa Redgrave	...	Dr. Sonia Wick
Whoopi Goldberg	...	Valerie Owens, RN
Angela Bettis	...	Janet Webber
Jillian Armenante	...	Cynthia Crowley
Drucie McDaniel	...	M.G.
Alison Claire	...	Nurse Gretta
Christina Myers	...	Nurse Margie
Joanna Kerns	...	Annette Kaysen

Also Known As:

Durchgeknallt (Germany)
Durchgeknallt - Girl, interrupted (Germany) (TV title)

MPAA:

Rated R for strong language and content relating to drugs, sexuality and suicide.

Runtime:

127 min

Country:

Germany | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital | SDDS

Certification:

Singapore:PG (cut) | Iceland:14 | Iceland:16 (video rating) | USA:R (certificate #36459) | Malaysia:18PL | Malaysia:U (cut version) | Portugal:M/16 | Philippines:R-18 | Singapore:NC-16 (re-rating) | Brazil:14 | Argentina:16 | Australia:MA | Canada:16+ (Québec) | Chile:14 | Finland:K-14 | Germany:12 | Hong Kong:IIB | Mexico:B | New Zealand:M | South Korea:18 | Spain:18 | Sweden:15 | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | UK:15

Filming Locations:

Hanover, Pennsylvania, USA

Company:

3 Art Entertainment

Trivia:

The guy who first starts dancing with Susannah at the post-graduation party is an uncredited cameo by Henry Alex Rubin, the film's Second Unit Director.

Goofs:

Continuity: In the taxi when Susanna first goes to Claymoore, she lights a cigarette. Then she jumps into a flashback. When the flashback is over, she lights a cigarette again. There is no sign of the cigarette before the flashback.

Quotes:

Susanna: Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is... Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends and by the '70s most of them were out living lives. Some I've seen, some never again, but there isn't a day my heart doesn't find them.

Movie Connections:

Features Gilda (1946)

Soundtrack:

Sleigh Ride

That Girl

"Borderline personality disorder" is one of those phrases that says more about the people who invented it than it does about the patient it's supposed to describe. When Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) the 18-year old heroine of "Girl Interrupted" enters Claymoore hospital, a psychiatric facility outside Boston, she is diagnosed with the syndrome - but in fact, all she's done is made a hapless suicide attempt and acted slack and mopey and lost in her sober daydreams. Her personality isn't borderline -- it's self-pitying and indulgent. Fortunately, the film understands this. Set in 1967, and adapted from Kaysen's memoir of her two-year experience as an adolescent in the throes of a middle-class crack up, "Girl Interrupted" is shrewd, tough and lively - a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that never makes the mistake of portraying its protagonist as a victim-naif. She's more like the original poster child for Prozac Nation: a girl who'd rather interrupt her own life, even if it means going a little crazy, than grow up.

Susanna is thrown in with a turbulent gallery of disturbed young women. They range from a girl who tried to burn her own face off to one who won't eat anything but chicken from her father's deli (she stores the carcasses under the bed). Most of the patients are harmless, but Lisa (Angelina Jolie) a heartless, charismatic sociopath, delights in her destructive power. Jolie brings the kind of combustible sexuality to the screen that our movies, in the age of Meg Ryan have been missing for too long. As Susanna and Lisa become comrades, then enemies, Susanna becomes like a space cadet fighting a secret war with herself, and through Lisa she plays out that war. The film allows Ryder to trace Susanna's gradual emergence from her "borderline" state as she confronts the cruel truth of mental illness.

Directed with satisfying authority by James Mangold, "Girl Interrupted" is really about the thorny neurotic underside of a contemporary young woman's struggle to leave childhood behind. By the end, you feel that Ryder, at long last, has done that as an actress.