**
Cast: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg
Director: James Mangold
Rating: M
Opens: Cinemas nationwide, Thursday
Review:Peter Calder
No cliche escapes unused in this lightweight adaptation of an autobiographical memoir by Susanna Kaysen which is, by all accounts, both spare and moving.
When Mangold (Cop Land) and his co-writers (Anna Hamilton Phelan, who wrote Gorillas In
The Mist and Mask, is credited, with Lisa Loomer) want us to see the seasons passing, they do a fade cut from a leafy to a leafless tree; when they want to show us that Susanna (Ryder) isn't really crazy, they wheel in a psychiatrist so unsympathetic he should have been played by Christopher Walken with fangs.
"Maybe I wasn't crazy," Susanna tells us in a dull monotone voiceover at the beginning. "Maybe I was just a girl interrupted." (The reference is to the title of a Vermeer painting although the film never makes this clear). Trouble is, she's chasing a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka at the time, so her self-diagnosis seems a little suspect.
In any event she's diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, one of those catch-all phrases which psychiatry once used to classify non-
conformity. She commits herself to a mental hospital Ñ unaware that she can't discharge herself from it - and comes under the care of a no-nonsense ward nurse (Goldberg) who observes accurately that she is "a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving herself crazy."
The film is set in 1968 and it wastes no opportunity to counterpoint Sus-anna's inner turmoil with the social upheaval of the age (the counter-culture is derailing conservative America's hopes for its youngsters and Robert Kennedy's assassination reminds us that the country's going to hell in a handcart).
And there's a leaden predictability about the way Susanna makes friends within the walls of the asylum who lead her back to her sense of self - never mind that she goes home and leaves them all in the hellhole we've been encouraged to revile.
A shonky melodramatic climax adds insult to injury and the film is redeemed only by Jolie, whose charming sociopath Lisa is this film's equivalent of Jack Nicholson's R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Swaggering, defiant and self-destructive, she turns in a ferocious and incandescent performance which is as sexy as it is scary. Beside her, Ryder looks wan and self-absorbed and it's hard to resist the conclusion that she just needs a good slap around the chops.
