Login
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.
