Review: Girl, Interrupted

There is an amazing blip of a moment in Girl, Interrupted when Angelina Jolie flashes her eyes upward and is utterly diabolical, as if she were the devil incarnate. As Lisa, one of the unhinged young women in James Mangold's riveting filming of Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Jolie storms and rages through the picture, wowing us with a performance that is raw, bareboned and delivered full-throttle. There has been major buzz that she'll receive a Supporting Actress nomination come Oscar time - her fiery performance certainly warrants the hype.

With Jolie's animal energy, it may be easy to overlook Winona Ryder's central performance as Susanna Kaysen but you shouldn't make the mistake of taking her for granted. It's often more difficult to anchor a film by playing a character who must tread the line between passivity and reactivity.

"Have you ever confused a dream with life? Have you ever been blue? Maybe it was the Sixties. Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted," Susanna muses as the film begins. It is the Sixties - women burning their bras, everyone getting high and starting a revolution - and she is of the age where she must decide what she wants to be, which values to embrace, which flaws should be regarded as graces and which should be disposed of. She knows she doesn't want to go to college, she knows she wants to write, she knows she no longer wants to have an affair with the college professor who, along with his wife, is a friend of her parents. Like many girls her age, she's gone into that twilight state when death is a better alternative to life. Like some of those girls, she tries to kill herself. Unlike some of those girls, she survives and is sent to a psychiatric ward for a rest. The rest lasts for nearly two years.

Once inside, she must contend with her new world which is inhabited by teenage girls like Lisa, a seductive sociopath who sees insanity as a form of clarity; Daisy (Brittany Murphy), a fragile daddy's girl addicted to her father's rotisserie chicken and laxatives; Polly (Elisabeth Moss), whose burned face guarantees that she will never fully understand what it is to be a woman; Georgina (Clea DuVall), Susanna's roommate who is a pathological liar; and Janet (Angela Bettis), who believes 74 pounds is the perfect weight. Their "disorders" may be just amplified versions of the problems any adolescent experiences. Susanna is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, whose symptoms include "uncertainty about self-image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choice, types of friends or loves to have…" Is this insanity? Or is it just life?

Mangold trips the narrative and also distorts the line between consciousness and dreaming. Particularly effective is the sequence when Susanna drifts in and out of a drug-induced sleep, often waking up in her own past. The film's final sequence reprises the hallucinatory effect and darkens it so we're not quite certain if Susanna's most hellish descent in the snake pit is imagined or just a waking nightmare. The film's most harrowing section, however, is Susanna and Lisa's visit to Daisy, who has been released and is living in a house her father bought for her. The tension between Lisa and Daisy resurfaces and the two eye each other with not only wariness but a malicious mischief. The fatal consequences of their stay is the final straw for all involved.

There are fine cameos by Vanessa Redgrave as the ward's head psychiatrist and Whoopi Goldberg as the ward nurse. Both characters urge Susanna not to drop anchor - "You're just throwing it all away," Goldberg's Valerie tells Susanna, but she's unwilling to listen. Ryder comes even more alive when Susanna is allowed to express her disgust with her situation and question the validity of her diagnosis. Her lashing out at Valerie is particularly wincing. Ryder never overplays, choosing instead to trace Susanna's arc with her large, long-lashed, expressive eyes.

Girl, Interrupted

Directed by: James Mangold

Written by: James Mangold, Lisa Loomer, Anna Hamilton Phelan; based on the memoir by Susanna Kaysen

Starring: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Clea DuVall, Elisabeth Moss, Brittany Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Angela Bettis, Bruce Altman, Mary Kay Place, Kurtwood Smith