Girl,
Interrupted
Rated R
Opens Friday, Jan. 14
http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/girlinterrupted/
There is just something about crazy girls. Woody Allen rhapsodized
about their sexual assuredness in Husbands and Wives;
Norman Mailer perceptively drooled over their tragic Madonna/whore
complexities in Marilyn; and Elizabeth Wurtzel unintentionally
revealed their egomaniacal obsession with thinking themselves
special in her autobiography Prozac Nation, to cite
but a few examples. Ever since the patron saint of nutcases,
Sylvia Plath, wrote her Barbie-goes-bananas novel The Bell
Jar, female breakdown (or rather, young, pretty, East
Coast breakdown) has been a mainstay of pop culture. A sexy
horror show of Edie Sedgwicks dumping Ivy League colleges
so they can tromp around in black tights and shove heroin
into their skinny arms, crazy women excite us, but do they
ever really enlighten us?
Proof positive lies in so many overrated and hyperbolic
confessional books by women (almost always) who believe
that because their character is emotionally scarred, they
must be geniuses or, at the very least, a great deal
more perceptive than the rest of us. This is exactly the
MO behind the screen adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's well-written,
bestselling autobiography Girl, Interrupted. A trite
rehash of the age-old question "What is crazy?," director
James Mangold's film is an often boring and oddly annoying
treatment of the distressing convergence of insanity, creativity
and burgeoning womanhood. It's a convergence that, in the
right hands, could reap entertaining and glamorous rewards,
but it succeeds on neither level.
"Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe it was just the '60s. Or maybe
I was just a girl--interrupted," begins our heroine, Susanna
(Winona Ryder), who, after downing a bottle of aspirin and
chasing it with vodka, is pressured into a "voluntary" commitment
at Claymoore, a posh psychiatric institution in Massachusetts.
Other than her possible suicide attempt, we never really
know why Susanna is sent to Claymoore and diagnosed with
borderline personality disorder, and neither does she. But
we get an inkling. She had an affair with an older married
man, comes from a typical '60s "plastic" household, is slightly
different from her peers, wants to be a writer and talks
about bones missing from her hands. She's not nuts, but
troubled. Therefore, she is horrified when she first meets
the brood inhabiting Claymoore. There's the self-inflicted
burn victim Polly (the overacting Elisabeth Moss), the pathological
liar obsessed with L. Frank Baum's Oz books (a touching
Clea DuVall), a Doris Day tragedienne with a disturbing
Daddy complex who eats only rotisserie chicken and laxatives
(an exceptional Brittany Murphy) and Lisa (the no-holds-barred
Angelina Jolie), a supposed sociopath who rules the roost
like a supermodel version of Randle P. McMurphy. Gradually,
Susanna accepts the girls as friends--especially the attractive
Lisa--and the picture moves along with a few nice scenes
involving their cute, not-very-psychotic antics and one
horrifying suicide.
But, really, that's about it. Kaysen's book was obviously
a tough adaptation, and Mangold (who directed Heavy and
Cop Land), along with screenwriters Lisa Loomer and
Anna Hamilton Phelan, was clearly not up to the task of
turning a rather unexceptional nut-house stay into dramatic
entertainment. Susanna's two-year journey of self-discovery
makes for shallow treatment of all-too-familiar themes--the
tumultuous '60s, the horrors of adolescence, the roots of
creativity, the triumphs of inspiration--and then turns
it into self-help, right-on-Oprah mush.
Had Mangold stuck to one theme or simply got the girls
more riled up, à la Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor,
Frances, The Snake Pit or Suddenly, Last
Summer--all classics of the insanity genre--Susanna's
melodramatic narration wouldn't be so embarrassingly eye-rolling.
If a movie cannot deliver the thematic goods, it should
at least rely on the universal truism that crazy girls are
sexy. If he couldn't provide any drama, Mangold should have
given us more knockout catfights and strong female bonding.
Still, Kaysen's tale was never that dramatic in the first
place. She stayed at a nice place for rich girls (not some
horrible state institution) and simply wondered whether
or not she was crazy. Ryder plays her ambivalence well--too
well. For an actress who relates so strongly to mental problems,
she is an absolute bore. Sporting the same damn haircut
she's had for a decade, staring blankly with her big dull
eyes and intoning every word with that pseudo-sensitive
yet tough delivery, Ryder is the least charismatic chick
in the cuckoo's nest. We don't care about her; we don't
even like her. She seems like an ordinary person who yearns
to be interesting, which Kaysen probably was. (Why else
would someone OD on aspirin? Didn't her mother have any
Valium in the house?)
The fascinating person here--and the only spirit in the
movie--is Jolie's Lisa. Glamorously stumbling around the
corridors like a '60s Frances Farmer (whose own harrowing
autobiography makes Kaysen look like a whiny spoiled brat),
Jolie's scene-chewing performance is funny, lively and,
most important, both sympathetic and sexy. Without
Jolie as Lisa, this film would merely be Girl, Insubstantial.
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 12,
1999
|
