Patron Pick – Girl, Interrupted

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Girl, Interrupted (1999)
Written by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, and Anna Hamilton Phelan
Directed by James Mangold

I was surprised when I saw this film was directed and co-written by the filmmaker behind such pictures as Logan and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. A memoir adapted to film about an emotionally troubled teenage girl living through the tumult of the late 1960s didn’t seem like what I expected from Mangold, but I learned Winona Ryder brought him onto the project. She got the ball rolling on this film after reading the book of the same name by Susanna Kaysen, who Ryder would play in the picture. I wish I loved this movie, but I would be lying. The subject matter should make me invested, but ultimately, the directorial choices and the acting, in particular, held me back from becoming emotionally invested. Ariana said while we were watching that the acting reminded her of a slightly more mature Disney Channel original movie.

Susanna (Ryder) is eighteen when she attempts suicide via a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of alcohol. She is found, stomach pumped, and before she can really regain her bearings, has been coerced into signing herself into Claymoore, a psychiatric hospital. At first, Susanna pushes back as the professionals at Claymore want her to unpack what led to that suicide attempt. The young woman won’t even admit she tried to take her own life. 

Friendships and tensions form with the other women in the ward. Polly (Elisabeth Moss) is an unemotional, stunted person whose schizophrenia caused her to do great violence to her body. Daisy (Britney Murphy) is struggling with bulimia and OCD. Georgina (Clea Duvall) is a pathological liar. And then there’s Lisa (Angelina Jolie), a rebellious and charismatic patient who guides Susanna down a dark path.

I completely understand if this is a favorite/comfort film for someone, especially if they were coming of age when the picture was released. There are movies from my youth that I intellectually understand as not being great, but they press the right buttons and leave me feeling connected to something from my past. 

That said, I knew I was in for a rough time with the first bits of voiceover from Ryder: “Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60’s. Or maybe I was just a Girl…(Looks into the camera)…Interrupted.” It’s so woefully on the nose, lacking nuance, that you need to tell a story like this with sensitivity. I got a somewhat cartoonish & overly simplistic look at mental health and the psychological stresses of being a woman.

It’s not a stretch to say this film was clamoring to be a darling of the awards season. Events are highly over-dramatized, which causes them to lose their grounding in reality. Because the people involved want the audience to understand how serious this situation is, they push things over the top. 

As a result, the story passes into the realm of the cartoonish. Susanna and Lisa feel like caricatures of people with mental health issues, delivering lines that are far too polished & direct. The film needed messiness & chaos. It tries, but it doesn’t convey that in a realistic sense. I was always very aware I was watching a movie where people were pretending to have mental illnesses.

I kept thinking about the far better-directed Heaven Knows What from the Safdie Brothers. This was also based on a memoir by Arielle Holmes, who plays a fictionalized version of herself in the picture. She also wrote the script. The story follows her during a critical time as her heroin addiction and relationships with other addicts are coming to a tragic climax. The Safdies understood how to ensure all the picture’s elements were synchronized with the tone of Holmes’ writing. It feels pseudo-documentarian to a degree, with actors allowed to move about in public spaces, improvise some, and create a strong sense of what it feels like to be inside the head of someone so dysregulated. This is what I wanted from Girl, Interrupted. I wanted to be inside Susanna’s head. What I got was that I felt that I was inside a movie, watching people act out scenes from the book.

For a more contemporaneous film, But I’m a Cheerleader leans into its bold, hyper-stylized world and still manages to tell a touching story about a young woman forced into a situation where she must come to terms with who she is. It’s not a 1:1 match, but director Jamie Babbit’s choices gave me a stronger emotional reaction to its characters’ conclusions. 

Girl, Interrupted doesn’t lead to an ending that feels original. It’s a toothless One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, something trying to present dark elements but afraid to really explore them. The end result is an overly polished Hollywood picture posing as something grittier. The young women are over-simplified into being their neuroses and nothing else. It’s a shame because movies about mental health & the marginalization of people with these issues are needed.