# Girl, Interrupted (1999)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

GIRL, INTERRUPTED (Columbia) Starring: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, Clea Duvall, Brittany Murphy, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Vanessa Redgrave. Screenplay: James Mangold, based on the memoir by Susanna Kaysen. Producers: Douglas Wick and Cathy Konrad. Director: James Mangold. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, drug use) Running Time: 127 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

It's time now for another chapter from Scott's Book of Cinematic Pet Peeves. Our subject today is something I refer to as Characterization Via Accusation. It's that annoying thing some films do in which characters' psychological back-story is revealed not through the actions of those characters, but through the things other characters say about them in the middle of dramatic confrontations. It's the kind of lazy writing that can wound even a film like AMERICAN BEAUTY, as when Ricky Fitts tells Angela "you're ugly and you're boring ... and you know it." Film is a medium of showing, not telling. A script full of probing psychoanalytical dialogue is a script unable --or unwilling -- to show viewers what the characters are all about.

Susanna Kaysen's memoir GIRL, INTERRUPTED found the writer exploring her 18 month experience in a psychiatric hospital with a journalistic distance, as though she were describing the experience of another person. That's a restraint James Mangold's adaptation could have used a lot more of. The film version shows us Susanna (Winona Ryder) as she is evaluated after a possible suicide attempt as an 18-year-old in 1968. Susanna eventually commits herself voluntarily to Claymoore Psychiatric Hospital, where she finds herself in the company of some uniquely troubled young women. Her roommate Georgina (Clea DuVall) is a pathological liar; Daisy (Brittany Murphy) will only eat her father's deli chicken. And Lisa (Angelina Jolie) ... well, Lisa's just a good old-fashioned sociopath. Through her experience, Susanna begins to question who she is, and how easy it can be to be defined by others -- or even by yourself -- as crazy.

The question of whether or not Susanna ever belonged at Claymoore was central to the book, in chapters exploring how quickly she was diagnosed with the vaguely-defined condition of "borderline personality disorder." Mangold takes the subject just a bit farther, flashing back to Susanna's life as a morose, directionless teenager in an upper class family. The time period itself plays a role as well, especially when symptoms of her condition like "rebelliousness" and "sexual promiscuity" were symptoms for a majority of her peer group in the late 1960s. GIRL, INTERRUPTED becomes something of a coming-of-age story in which Susanna begins to realize that her own "insanity" is an affectation compared to the much more profound problems of her Claymoore cohort. As one nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) tells her, her psychiatric problem may simply be that she's a "lazy, self-indulgent little girl."

The problem is that the nurse has to tell her -- and, by extension, us. That's also only one of half a dozen or so scenes in which characters begin dissecting the others by revealing their deep, dark secrets. Lisa taunts Daisy about her relationship with her father; Susanna screams at Lisa about her own problems; a psychiatrist (Vanessa Redgrave) tells Susanna about why she uses the word "ambivalent." GIRL, INTERRUPTED becomes a film all about cathartic movie moments, including a happy-go-lucky, CUCKOO'S NEST-like outing and a chase through tunnels beneath the hospital (a chase through tunnels?!?). Whatever points Kaysen and Mangold might have been trying to make about the fine line between sanity and insanity -- or about how those lines may be defined differently for women -- are lost in tearful breakdowns and manufactured drama.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Angelina Jolie's performance as Lisa, the wild child who serves as the ward's alpha female. It would be remiss not because Jolie's performance is exceptional -- showy, flashy and fun, perhaps, though not exceptional -- but because it's a movie performance of a real-life character. Everything in GIRL, INTERRUPTED seems designed to be satisfying as entertainment, not to be true to Susanna Kaysen's life or her unique perspective on that life. It's a movie that feels always and forever like a movie. That means punch lines and crescendos; it means Winona Ryder shouting a story better told in quieter tones; it means one of the worst false beards in film history on Jared Leto as Susanna's boyfriend. And it means everyone telling everyone else how crazy they are or aren't, every character's story an open book ... or, in this case, an open script.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 speech therapies:  5.

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