director
James Mangold
screenwriters
James Mangold
Lisa Loomer
Anna Hamilton Phelan
based on
the memoir by
Susanna
Kaysen
producers
Cathy Konrad
Douglas Wick
cinematographer
Jack N. Green
music
Mychael Danna
editor
Kevin Tent
cast
Winona Ryder (Susanna Kaysen)
Angelina Jolie (Lisa Rowe)
Clea DuVall (Georgina Tuskin)
Brittany Murphy (Daisy Randone)
Elisabeth Moss (Polly 'Torch' Clark)
Jared Leto (Tobias Jacobs)
Jeffrey Tambor (Dr. Melvin Potts)
Vanessa Redgrave (Dr. Sonia Wick)
Whoopi Goldberg (Valerie Owens R.N.)
Joanna Kerns (Annette Kaysen)
Bruce Altman (Professor Gilcrest )
Mary Kay Place (Mrs. Gilcrest)
Kurtwood Smith (Dr. Crumble)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 127m
u.s.
release: 12/21/99
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other james
mangold films
reviewed on this website:
- cop
land
- identity
- walk
the line
|
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 new 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. |
