* * *
Running time: 125 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
In 1967 Susanna (Winona Ryder) is committed to a rather nice-looking New England psychiatric hospital after sculling a jar of aspirins and chasing them down with a bottle of vodka. "Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe it was just the 60s. Or
maybe I was just a girl — interrupted," she says. Susanna has been diagnosed with a "borderline personality disorder."
At the hospital she's met by the chief nurse (Whoopi Goldberg) who may be closer to the mark: "You are a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who is driving yourself crazy."
Based on Susanna Kaysen's memoirs, the movie puts the proposition that sane people can become institutionalised because once they're inside the hospital system it's assumed something must be wrong with them. Sound familiar? Read Janet Frame.
Susanna's new pals are Lisa, a rebel misfit (Angelina Jolie); Georgina (Clea Duvall), who would like to live in the land of Oz; burn victim Polly (Elisabeth Moss), and deeply troubled Daisy (Brittany Murphy). The cardboard cutout staff are a bureaucrat (Jeffrey Tambor) and a psychiatrist (Vanessa Redgrave).
More a collection of episodes — some silly, some powerful, some puzzling — than a fully realised story, Girl, Interrupted is a glorious failure for Ryder, but worth watching for Jolie's Oscar-winning performance. "Jolie is emerging as one of the great wild spirits of current movies, a loose cannon who somehow has deadly aim," wrote one critic.
