In the year 2001, with our ever-expanding attempt to explain ourselves, there are probably more people who fit the psychology textbook definition of "depressed" than people who don't. If that were ever publicized during Susanna Kaysen's era, the 1960s, half of society would be locked up in a mental institution. I mention this because in Girl, Interrupted, director James Mangold seems to want to imply this factoid without really delivering the goods. Sometimes I felt sympathy for some of the certified residents, sometimes I doubted any of them were insane enough to belong there, and sometimes I wondered where this journey was even supposed to end up.
This is both the merit and the downfall of this ambiguous film. Winona Ryder plays Kaysen in a true story of a suicidal young woman who signs herself into Claymoore, an asylum outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Through a series of flashbacks, we see a little more of Kaysen's background and motives. As time goes by, she starts to make new friends (Clea Duvall, Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss), including the volatile Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie. Jolie and Ryder are quite good and rise above what is essentially a female version of Dead Poets Society meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (there is even a cameo appearance by Kurtwood Smith, who played Robert Sean Leonard's father in Dead Poets Society). One of the problems is the rest of the cast. Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor as the resident psychiatrists are hollow, Joanna Kerns as "the Mother" is even worse here than she was on TV's Growing Pains, and I have yet to see Whoopi Goldberg put in a half-decent performance within the last decade.
What works best in Girl Interrupted is its unexpected comic moments. There's a tense scene at an ice cream parlour that is resolved in a most amusing way, and the sarcastic one-liners by Susanna and Lisa add a lot more zing to the otherwise monotonous rubber room sequences. As always, Ryder is in top-form here, and Jolie secured an Oscar for her performance, although it surely helped that it was a well-constructed role to begin with.
I think the subject matter is nicely handled in this film. It's tough to make a capital D drama these days, but the meandering plot, while probably based heavily on Kaysen's memoirs, never really achieves dramatic liftoff. It kind of gets, well, interrupted over and over just when it starts to get good. A few scenes pack a punch, but then the gloves go up and again and there is too long a wait for the next bout.
