Girl, Interrupted Reviews

There’s nothing explicitly wrong with Girl, Interrupted, just a general sense that we have seen this material done before, much better, and with a more authentic tone. Striving hard for the same amount of pedigree and prestige as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but ending up a pileup of clichés from various “looney bin” movies, Girl, Interrupted is handsome looking and well-acted, but that’s about it.

The movie begins with a disjointed look at the tumultuous time, a brief window into the fragmented mind of our main character. Soon afterwards though, the film abandons this more daring visual style for a handsome but bland awards-bait look. And as it progresses forward, the film begins inventing entire sequences which feel completely artificial to the more harrowing moments. The most obvious and egregious of these is a scene late in the film where Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie have escaped the asylum, runaway to visit Brittany Murphy’s fragile bulimic, and find Murphy’s dead body in the bathroom the following morning. This scene strives hard for pathos, but it feels wholly invented for the purposes of making Jolie’s character a villainous conception.

That’s another problem with the film, as told from Ryder’s fractured perspective, various characters change from scene-to-scene with little consistency in their character’s development. Jolie’s suffers the worst, and as someone dealing with a personality disorder, some of this can be explained away. Yet the transition from wounded animal to purposefully being a villain isn’t smoothly traversed or explained. But Jolie is absolutely dynamite in the role, playing every wild outburst and manic fit for all its worth. She scorches the earth with her wild intensity, leaving just about every single other actor in her vicinity as a pile of ash from the intensity of her glow and commitment to the role.

Which doesn’t mean that Ryder isn’t doing great work herself, in fact, this is probably one of the best performances of her career, right up there with The Age of Innocence and Heathers. As a producer on the film as well, it’s clear that some of the more artificial scenes were invented to give her more time to demonstrate her range in the film, and Ryder does solid work, but her role isn’t showy. And when next to Jolie’s wild-woman, she sometimes falls into the background. This sounds a solid way to encapsulate the entire film – never truly bad, handsomely made, but lacking in the grit and reality that made other movies like this more lingering in the imagination.

It’s by all means a good film with great performances and a storyline that can really grab our attention. But for me, the strongest point of the movie is still showing a different side and very interesting from the "madness":

Instead of focusing on a character with clear problems (in the style, "Beautiful Mind", "Shutter Island" or "Awakenings"), what you see is a social side, collectively called the "insanity". It is this differentiated approach that allows the construction of a plot so engaging. And then, instead of having a single girl being interrupted by recurring dreams and memories, we have a whole group of girls with their youth and trimmed expectations for the drugs, isolation, fear of asking for help, and finally the "female - alpha" oppressive (lackness for a better term). And if the disease is collective, so is the cure. Only through the interaction between patients is true that the prospects of healing begin to emerge. Who hasn’t seen a group of healthy young friends having fun at the bowling alley? And genuinely defending the ice cream store? And who can doubt that the moment of maximum transparency between them, at the end of the film, was the catalyst to the improvement of them all over the 70 years?

Another unique approach of the film and just so important, is the break with that cliché: "the institution and society doesn’t want the cure of patients. "What there is, in fact, is a combination of several types of professionals, some more than others prepared, some more some less known, some more and others less willing to help. The common nurses, nurse John, psychiatrist and nurse Valerie Wick have different ways of acting and this influences sometimes negatively, sometimes positively recovery of patients. And this is no surprise, is a reflection of the society itself, composed of untrained people (Suzanna 's parents), genuinely concerned (the driver) or even "backers" of madness (as the father of Daisy).

Finally, it is interesting to notice that Brittany Murphy committed suicide, as did Wynona Rider in one of her first speeches, interrupted her career and now - with Black Swan - is already showing signs that she’s giving a comeback, Angelina Jolie is one of the most influential women in the world and been talking some truths (if anyone has read her article in "the Economist") and Elisabeth Moss to come from a family passionate about music (like her character Polly).

Angelina Jolie is scary good in this film. Winona Ryder will capture your heart, and the rest of the cast will pull in you. This true story is amazingly accurate to the book. I would recommend this film to any one who is interested in history or mental health.

''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.''

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

Winona Ryder: Susanna Kaysen

It's always easy to relegate a story or piece of art to a niche in the wall, claiming that it borrows or steals from other sources. In the case of Girl, Interrupted, it's very easy to say "It's a 'Cuckoo's Nest' with females." Looking at things on lower levels, one could argue that every tale steals from all those before. But the truth of the matter is that certain ideas are so fundamental, so classical, that they have applied to us for as long as anybody can remember. If basing a movie on a mental institution and its patients concocts discontent, then basing a movie on love is as much of a sin.



Girl, Interrupted pleasingly places us in the eyes of Susanna Kaysen(Winona Ryder), a teenage girl who suffers from depression and is signed into the custody of a psychiatric hospital after a failed attempt at suicide. Like most young people who suffer from this state, Susanna is unable to acknowledge the disorder that affects her. Seeing things from a practical point of view--believing in cause and effect--makes it difficult for her to understand what she suffers from when she doesn't understand what caused the condition to begin with.
Enter Lisa, faultlessly played by Angelina Jolie. Beautiful, savage, defiant, and extremely charismatic, she introduces Susanna to a new line of thought: - it's the world that's screwed up, not them. - The world is afraid of aberrations such as themselves -- people who create a bubble, in the perfect balance of their ideal mindset. Thus, they lock them up in mental institutions, and rejoice once that the problem is taken up by the hands of others after the exchange of a sizable amount of funding.

Susanna, needless to say, is enthralled by her new friend; Lisa is somebody who knows the inner workings of their world, someone to leech onto. And when one latches onto somebody else in such a way, either individually or in a group, self-expression and individuality are more often than not sacrificed. Susanna, who was once overwhelmed by the number of choices that confronted her in life, is now ecstatic at the simplicity of her new life in the ward, revolting with Lisa against an unfair system, an unfair world.

''I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.''

In my opinion, Mangold's directorial tricks are ones of illusionary truths, ones to be considered successful, such devices as the sound-overlap between present and flashback scenes, and the use of dull, toned-down colours until Ryder's singular moment of revelation(after which the bright, vibrant colours of autumn leaves and clear blue skies fill the screen)practically poke the viewer's shoulder with relentless insistence in their demand to be acknowledged.
Ryder's reasons for attempting suicide also seem remarkably indecisive – being diagnosed as having a borderline personality disorder is like being told you're nearly late when you're effectively early - she seems to suffer nothing worse than the average teenager, yet displays no characteristics to suggest that she suffers from a fragile mentality(which would at least explain why she breaks down when others wouldn't). Ironically, Ryder never really comes across as a troubled girl, and never really shows any horror or despair at being practically route-marched to the asylum without warning. The hospital itself is the kind of operation that would have bogus asylum seekers faking lunacy to get in. Jolie aside, there are no truly disturbed patients here, just eccentric(which in Hollywood parlance means loveable) characters; there's no despair in this institution, no desperation, no frustration, no boredom, all of which must have been endemic in such places.

At the heart of this film, however, lies a much more fundamental, classical idea: friendship... -- what causes it? -- how it can invigorate us in the worst of times, and its short and long-term effects on us. With a beautiful poetic grace, the movie states that it's not the duration of a relationship that matters, but who it is that you befriend, and the place that they earn in your heart while it lasts. Every relationship in our life is short-lived like a flicker of a candle, as we're continually moving forward in our journey towards a fulfilled existence, time does not stand still, and the film makes a conscious effort to constantly accentuate this concept, this aspect of mind.

''When you don't want to feel... death can seem like a dream. But, seeing death - really seeing it... makes dreaming about it fucking ridiculous.''

A brilliant exploration into the boundaries of reality set within an all-girl mental ward. Packed full of emotion and compelling performances. For my money Ryder, Jolie and Murphy all hit their career best with this film. However, It would be nice if they could prove me wrong.