Watch the whole of the James Mangold-directed adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted (title taken from a Vermeer painting), written about the author's time spent in a psychiatric instiution in the early 1960s. The institute she stayed in as a 19 year old is the famous McLean Institute in Cambridge, the same place Sylvia Plath spent time in during the 1950s. This film won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Angelina Jolie (as Lisa), and was produced by its co-star, Winona Ryder. It's hit and miss but has good moments, brilliantly black humour and offers a good insight into the minds and moods of those suffering from mental ill health. However, it also bears the scares of a bullet-spray of cliché, & a scrappy plot, but then I guess those living in psychiatric institutions live scrappy lives (and, as mentioned, it is based on real life). A good 60s soundtrack featuring the one, the only, Petula Clark. Only thing I hated about the film and felt really let it down was the obvious 'magical negro' stereotype character (played, as ever, by Whoopi Goldberg). When will they learn?
Watch the whole film below in 13 parts, followed by 3 reviews from the Guardian newspaper. (None of which are sparkling to be honest. They were probably too wacked out on Xanax to make notes in the screening. Or ogling Angelina. One or the other).
Girl, Interrupted
The most interesting thing about Girl, Interrupted, a film version of Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her mental breakdown in the 1960s, is the provenance of the title. The picture begins with the narrator telling us: 'Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted.' This is commonplace enough until one starts wondering precisely what 'a girl, interrupted' means. In fact, Kaysen's book explains that the title comes from an experience she had first as a teenager, then 16 years later, of looking quite differently at a painting by Vermeer in the Frick Collection, New York, called 'Girl Interrupted At Her Music'. Maybe they should have included this in the film.
The most interesting thing about Girl, Interrupted, a film version of Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her mental breakdown in the 1960s, is the provenance of the title. The picture begins with the narrator telling us: 'Maybe I was just crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted.' This is commonplace enough until one starts wondering precisely what 'a girl, interrupted' means. In fact, Kaysen's book explains that the title comes from an experience she had first as a teenager, then 16 years later, of looking quite differently at a painting by Vermeer in the Frick Collection, New York, called 'Girl Interrupted At Her Music'. Maybe they should have included this in the film.
Girl, Interrupted starts in 1967 with the central character being incarcerated and later turning the experience into literature. Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) is the adolescent daughter of a middle-class Boston family, and the institution - based on the same place Sylvia Plath stayed in the Fifties - is a mental hospital for the well-heeled.
Anyone familiar with Plath's The Bell Jar, Hannah Greene's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden or a dozen other books and films about suicidal middle-class girls committed to mental hospitals will find that this picture adds little to their knowledge. In a manner that would have satisfied R.D. Laing, Susanna's condition - 'borderline personality disorder' - is blamed largely on her overly solicitous, insensitive parents and their circle, and the heroine gains more insight into herself from associating with fellow inmates than from her therapy. 'Crazy is just you or me amplified,' she observes.
The institution, however, is a warm, huggy place with a lovable chief nurse (a beaming Whoopi Goldberg) and a fatherly Jewish shrink (bald, mustachioed Jeffrey Tabor). The connection with the Sixties ethos is underlined by casting as head of the hospital Vanessa Redgrave, star some 35 years ago of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, one of the most Laingian pictures of the Swinging London era.
The best performance in the movie comes from Oscar-nominated Angelina Jolie as an aggressive sociopath, a dangerous charmer who stirs up the girls against their keepers the way Jack Nicholson does with his fellow patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and she too is zonked with ECT. The oddest aspect of the movie is the suggestion that the best form of therapy is watching The Wizard of Oz, which is certainly cheaper than spending hours on a psychiatrist's couch, and you can do it at home.
by Philip French, Sunday March 26th, 2000
Girl, Interrupted is a film about mental illness that arrives heavily dosed up on Prozac. This, it transpires, is a problem. Because, try as it might, this 60s-set tale of pretty girls with problems can never generate the rollercoaster peaks and troughs that one might associate with your average manic-depressive. It sticks throughout to the centre of the road, idles permanently at room temperature.
The clues are there from the outset, as Winona Ryder's pensive aspiring suicide is propelled through a tacky Graduate-style party before being ferried up the drive of an exclusive mental institution where Whoopi Goldberg stands waiting. In the last decade or so, Ms Goldberg (with her twinkly eyes and kindly smile) has become shorthand for a certain strain of MOR cinema, and her early introduction sends a reassuring message. No matter what trials lie in store, it says, the viewer can rest assured that they will never bite too deeply, disturb too greatly. Whoopi simply won't allow it.
Adapted from Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl, Interrupted plays out around the dormitories and recreation rooms of Claymoore hospital, a place where timid teens stroke plastic dollies, dance in the hallway and blub in the bedroom. Queen of the roost - a sort of Fonzy for the mentally unbalanced - is Angelina Jolie's sexy, feline sociopath, while the pillars of authority are represented, variously, by nurse Whoopi, head doctor Vanessa Redgrave and shrink Jeffrey Tambor (better known as Hank from The Larry Sanders Show). At times James Mangold's movie views like a St. Trinian's take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (several scenes - the pill-dispensing interlude and the wild lights-out party in the ward - look like direct steals from the Forman film). At others, Girl, Interrupted offers a roll-call of generic coming-of-age kicks, all underpinned by retro-60s stylistics (VW vans, bong-smoking hippies, the Doors turned up loud).
It's not that Girl, Interrupted is ever flat-out bad. The whole package is too polished for that, with its photogenic inhabitants (Ryder and the Oscar-nominated Jolie) and ballbearing-smooth direction. But as drama, as an insight into teen angst, it simply doesn't connect. The film is just too safe, too cosy, too conservative to draw you in the way it should.
Most crucially of all, Girl, Interrupted is fashioned around a fundamental error of judgement. Its inmates are cosseted debutantes from wealthy homes; its setting a Priory for spoilt brats. This isn't to say that that the rich don't have problems too, simply that it is that much harder to work up the required sympathy when they do. "This place is a fuckin' fascist torture chamber!" squawks Winona at one stage, but the viewer is more inclined to go along with Whoopi's view that our heroine is nothing more than "a lazy, self-indulgent little girl" who is making unnecessary problems for herself. In this way, Girl, Interrupted asks us to shed tears over these girls while simultaneously arguing that the only medicine they need is some tough love and a few homespun life-lessons. A dunk in a cold bath, a cuddle with Whoopi ("I'm sorry," sobs Winona), and they'll probably be enrolled in an Ivy League college by the fall.
by Xan Brooks, Friday March 24th, 2000
Winona Ryder is the star and co-executive producer of Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold (Heavy, Cop Land), a film tremulous with self-importance. Throughout, Ryder is elfin-like, as if she is going to hop onto your palm any second and start emoting. She is Susanna, a troubled teen forced to check into a psychiatric hospital in 1967 after a suicide attempt. There she meets the statutory sub-Cuckoo's Nest line-up of weirdos and wackos, presided over by the ineffably smug and understanding female ward nurse Whoopi Goldberg.
The iron law of Prettiness-Apartheid applies. They are all uglies, plain-Janes, one of them actually having horrific burn-scars (just to emphasise the point), except for Winona and her co-star Angelina Jolie, the swaggering bad girl who has just been brought back after, of all the way-cool things, an escape attempt . Naturally, Winona and Angelina bond. But Winona never does any unsightly, unsexy things associated with genuine emotional or psychological disorder. It's the fatsos and the losers who do the arm-slashing and laxative-hoarding, while winsome Winona just scribbles sensitively in her notebook, sometimes writing in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasise that she does have a disorder of some sort. Otherwise, the bug-eyed, strangely sexless Winona might as well be a sensitive co-ed hunched on her bed after some sort of sorority hazing ritual. One for Channel 5.
by Peter Bradshaw, Friday March 24, 2000
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