Crazy Is as Crazy Does
FILM: Girl, Interrupted
DIRECTOR: James Mangold
STARRING: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie
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RELATIVELY SANE SUSANNA (WINONA RIDER) FINDS A FRIEND IN RELATIVELY WACKO LISA
(OSCAR-NOMINATED ANGELINA JOLIE) IN GIRL, INTERRUPTED.
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As award season arrived, lots of talk centered around James Mangold's Girl,
Interrupted. The reasoning of such speculation completely eluded me,
particularly predictions that Winona Ryder might land an Oscar nomination for
best actress. Sometimes, individual performances are so outstanding that they
rise above the mediocrity of their film. That's certainly the case this year of
Denzel Washington's star turn as Rubin Carter in Norman Jewison's otherwise
flawed The Hurricane. And don't get me wrong. I think Ryder is an
enormously talented performer. I've written with enthusiasm about her work in
Little Women, The Age of Innocence, The Crucible, Night
on Earth and Heathers. But there's nothing special about her
performance in Girl, Interrupted, and the film itself is a mess.
Adapted from Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted is
the story of a young woman's battle with mental illness. When Susanna (Ryder)
takes a bottle of aspirin and washes it down with a quart of vodka, her parents
convince her to commit herself to a comfortable private asylum. Because her mom
packs her off in a cab, we think this is going to be a story about escaping
from uncaring parents, an impression underscored by Susanna's calm if sarcastic
psychiatric interview upon her arrival at the institution. But gradually, both
Susanna and the viewer come to understand that the protagonist is suffering
from emotional distress and borderline personality. She needs to be
institutionalized, and she is -- so where's the story?
That's exactly the problem. The patients in this film have the
usual run of the place. The staff turns out the lights, and Susanna and her
fellow inmates immediately take over and do whatever they want. Sort of like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without any of the sociopolitical
subtext. But Susanna isn't a "victim of the system," and she and everyone else
in the home need to be there. As a result, it seems entirely preposterous that
the staff allows the inmates to run the place after dark. It's almost as if the
picture switches narrative horses in midstream and gallops off in the opposite
direction. The nurses are strict but fundamentally kind. The orderlies are
attentive and gentle. The doctors are committed and capable. Susanna has but
two tasks. Eventually, she has to believe that she has indeed been ill so that
she can concentrate on getting better. And to that end, she first must
recognize that her inmate pal Lisa (Angelina Jolie, whose showier role earned a
questionably deserved Oscar nomination for best supporting actress) is
dangerously bonkers.
Girl, Interrupted screws up sundry matters of chronology of
the late 1960s in which it is set. But its abiding aggravation is the flatness
of its story. Mangold's script produces a dust devil of a film. It swirls
around a bit, but it never goes anywhere, and all it leaves behind is faint
disorder.
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