Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Starring: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Vanessa Redgrave, Clea DuVall, Whoopi Goldberg, Brittany Murphy
Director: James Mangold
Synopsis: touted as the 90's version of The Cuckoo's Nest it’s got Angelina Jolie in top form.
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

Girl, Interrupted arrived in cinemas carrying the rather daunting label of being One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the 1990s. The comparison was perhaps inevitable, for the two films share numerous similarities, although Milos Forman's masterpiece ultimately remains in a league of its own.

Based on Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her experiences in a psychiatric institution during the late 1960s, the film follows a troubled young woman trying to make sense of both herself and the world around her at a time when psychiatry was still very much finding its feet.

Winona Ryder, who also served as executive producer, stars as Susanna, a confused and emotionally adrift young woman who finds herself committed to Claymoore Hospital after washing down a bottle of aspirin with alcohol.

The film opens with Susanna looking back on those turbulent months, asking herself the questions that continue to haunt her. Was she genuinely mentally ill? Was she simply unusually sensitive? Had she been misunderstood? Or was she merely another casualty of the turbulent 1960s?

Beside her lies the almost lifeless figure of fellow patient Lisa, played by Angelina Jolie, whose motionless body appears almost corpse-like save for the tiny tear glistening in the corner of her eye.

Director James Mangold initially relies rather heavily on flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards through time in an attempt to explain Susanna's emotional state. Fortunately, once this early structure settles down, the film develops into an engaging character drama powered by an excellent ensemble cast.

It is, however, no Cuckoo's Nest.

Where Forman's masterpiece was brutal, uncompromising and emotionally devastating, Girl, Interrupted possesses a far softer, almost sentimental quality. There are numerous scenes of bonding between the patients, accompanied by wistful songs that gently remind us how we are supposed to feel. Several of the supporting patients also drift towards familiar psychiatric stereotypes rather than fully rounded characters.

None of this makes the film bad.

It simply prevents it from achieving the emotional force of the classic with which it has inevitably been compared.

Cuckoo's Nest depicted an indomitable free spirit slowly crushed beneath an oppressive system before culminating in one of cinema's greatest endings. Girl, Interrupted, by comparison, simply reaches its conclusion.

Perhaps the comparison is unfair.

Unfortunately, it is also unavoidable.

What elevates the film well above the ordinary is the strength of its two leading performances.

Winona Ryder, who had long been passionate about bringing Susanna Kaysen's memoir to the screen, gives a thoughtful, intelligent and restrained performance. Yet, impressive though she undoubtedly is, she finds herself completely eclipsed whenever Angelina Jolie appears.

Jolie dominates the film.

While several of the other patients occasionally verge on stereotype, Lisa feels utterly unpredictable and gloriously alive. Jolie brings extraordinary energy and danger to the role, creating a character who is magnetic, manipulative, funny, terrifying and strangely vulnerable, sometimes all within the same scene.

The film's finest emotional moment arrives after Lisa discovers Susanna's diary. Having cruelly read aloud the entries describing everyone else, she suddenly asks the question she has been avoiding herself.

"What does it say about me?"

Later, physically and emotionally broken, lying crumpled and seemingly defeated, she quietly reveals that beneath all the bravado there is still a frightened human being desperately clinging to life.

It is a remarkable performance.

Whoopi Goldberg is suitably restrained as Nurse Valerie, while the remainder of the cast acquit themselves well enough, but next to Jolie almost everyone else fades into the background.

If the film has one major weakness beyond the inevitable comparisons with Cuckoo's Nest, it is the relentlessly sentimental musical score. It rarely trusts either the actors or the audience, constantly signalling exactly what emotions we should be experiencing. Rather than complementing the drama, it often overwhelms it with syrupy insistence.

It is a memorably clumsy soundtrack.

Nevertheless, Girl, Interrupted remains a solid and often moving drama that asks important questions about a system willing to institutionalise confused, unhappy young people at a time when understanding of mental illness was far less sophisticated than it is today.

It never approaches the greatness of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Then again, very few films ever could.

What it does possess, however, is the performance that announced Angelina Jolie as a genuine major star. Despite all the publicity, the lips and the glamorous image that surrounded her, this was the film that demonstrated she possessed something far more valuable—an extraordinary screen presence.

The only disappointment is that she wasn't on screen even more.