Girl, Interrupted

The most striking and yet most frustrating part of `Girl, Interrupted' is that everybody that's been 19 years old can relate to Susanna, the main character. Based on her memoir, the film portrays Susanna Kaysen's short stay in a famous mental hospital, supposedly to cure her `borderline personality disorder.' Set in the late 1960's, Winona Ryder effectively portrays Kaysen.

In a tradition reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, the audience knows there is nothing actually wrong with Kaysen, except that she is a typical teenager, and refuses to conform to the life her parents want for her. However, after spending some time with her ward mates and numerous doctors, she starts to believe that she is insane, but can't understand why or what exactly is wrong with her. At one point, she asks a sympathetic nurse (played by Whoopi Goldberg) how she is expected to be cured if she doesn't even understand her illness. Throughout the film, writer James Mangold's exploration of Kaysen's changing emotions and attempts to understand her `illness' is captivating.

However, even more fascinating than Kaysen herself were the supporting characters. Perhaps the most striking of these characters though, is Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. Jolie completely immerses herself in the role, and gives a moving, intriguing and haunting performance as Susanna's best friend at the hospital. Although Ryder does an excellent job portraying the earnestness and confusion of her character, Jolie is the true star of this movie.

Adapted from Kaysen's memoir, the film works well to bring Kaysen's' words to life. The parts that were altered for the screenplay made sense, allowing the story to translate well to the screen. Additionally, the length of the film allowed for more depth and details to be explored, which sometimes left out of Kaysen's short novel. Thus, the film helped add onto and bring more understanding to characters which were introduced in the novel.

I loved this movie from on the first day I saw it. This story is so unique in its way showing the problems many people have to face when being young. The best thing about this movie is, that it's based upon the experience of the real Susanna Kaysen, which means that the story is not only real but also natural and not "brightened up" for entertainment. It shows reality as it is! The actors do a really great job and among other acting personalities we can find Whoopie Goldberg, Winona Ryder and Jared Leto which seem just perfect for the roles they embody. The story, which seems to me loving and cruel at the same time, is pictured by a wonderful musical score and great songs more or less known from those hard days known as the 60's. This movie is a MUST for everyone who is seeking for a deep, thoughtful and emotional film as well as great actors!

The absolute best thing about this film are the knockout performances by it's 2 main stars Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie though both characters (hence performances) are very different they stand out nonetheless. It seems to me to be somewhat easier to play a psychotic than to play a regular neurotic, so who really has the better portrayal of the two?

Brittany Murphy as "Daisy" shines in her scenes. She is a force to reckon with in her future film career.

James Mangold directed this film quite nicely from a very good screenplay; he managed to portray all these young women as young women in turmoil. No melodrama, no over the top sentimentality, just a frank peek into their tumultuous lives.

It is a heavy drama, so be forewarned! And a very moving drama at that.

GIRL, INTERRUPTED / (1999) ***1/2 (out of four)

By Blake French:

"Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60's. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted."

Those are some of the most memorable lines from James Mangold's honest, heartfelt drama "Girl Interrupted." The speaker is Susanna Kaysen, played by Winona Ryder. The film is based on the memoir of Kaysen herself, re-encountering the experiences she actually spent in a mental institution after an attempted suicide. The book of the same name was published in 1993; it spent time on almost every best-seller list, including 11 weeks on the New York Times.

It was in the 1980's when Kaysen began to revisit the most formative time in her life-20 years after the actual hospitalization. Memories of a nearly two-year stay at McLean Psychiatric Hospital, a private and exclusive institution near Cambridge, resurfaced while constructing her second book. She began writing vignettes of her experiences in the hospital, writing short stories about a time in her life she had not discussed for two decades.

"The only thing that ever made me less loony was writing," remembers Cambridge, Massachusetts-based writer Susanna Kaysen, author of her memoir, "Girl, Interrupted." Set in the turbulent 60's, the film details the young Kaysen, who finds herself at a mental institution for disturbed young women. Susanna makes friends, including a seductive and dangerous regular named Lisa (Angelina Jolie).

I have never read this book, but after watching "Girl, Interrupted" I am seriously considering it. The film is a powerful exploration into a depressing, bleak situation. When this movie was released theatrically in late 1999, I wondered how many people would want to see something about a young writer who tries to kill herself and then spends time in a nut-house. However, I was wrong to presume anything. "Girl, Interrupted" contains a vivid, convincing world for its characters, but never do we feel awkward while watching this film, but involved and concerned.

Screen-adapters James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, and Anna Hamilton Phelan construct a central character that is both consistent and empathetic. As the movie opens, we never see Kaysen's suicide attempt-there is no need to show it. This is a film about the results, not the action. We gradually learn about Kaysen as the movie progresses, thus the lack of initial character development. Even with little introductory material to establish her character, Winona Ryder creates a soothing, intriguing sole for Kaysen. The audience cares about Susanna before we even understand why she was sent to the mental institution.

The film's supporting cast, including Jared Leto, Clea Duvall, Elizabeth Moss, Jeffrey Tambor, Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave, and Angelina Jolie, who won an Academy Award for her performance, actually develops the mood of the film-an essential aspect of its overall impact. James Mangold ("Copland") has a ambiguous style here, but it works extraordinarily well in this film. "Girl, Interrupted" should do wonders for Susanna Kaysen's book; after watching the film, it is hard not to want to read the memoir.

"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.