Une vie volée

Seeing this film reminds me of everything that is wrong with adults. They confuse spontaneity and originality and discovering yourself with mental illness. Act out a little in school, and it's ADHD. Act out at home, and it's bring on the Prozac.

Winona Ryder was incredible as the teen who was really just being a rebellious teen, and got caught up in a system that won't let loose until you admit you are crazy, even if you aren't. She is joined by the best performance I have ever seen by Whoopi Goldberg.

As good as these two were, it was Angelina that shined in this film. Jolie was absolutely incredible as the one who was really off the deep end. She was in so much pain, that she loved causing it to others. A super performance by a super actress.

"Borderline personality disorder" is one of those phrases that says more about the people who invented it than it does about the patient it's supposed to describe. When Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) the 18-year old heroine of "Girl Interrupted" enters Claymoore hospital, a psychiatric facility outside Boston, she is diagnosed with the syndrome - but in fact, all she's done is made a hapless suicide attempt and acted slack and mopey and lost in her sober daydreams. Her personality isn't borderline -- it's self-pitying and indulgent. Fortunately, the film understands this. Set in 1967, and adapted from Kaysen's memoir of her two-year experience as an adolescent in the throes of a middle-class crack up, "Girl Interrupted" is shrewd, tough and lively - a junior-league "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that never makes the mistake of portraying its protagonist as a victim-naif. She's more like the original poster child for Prozac Nation: a girl who'd rather interrupt her own life, even if it means going a little crazy, than grow up.

Susanna is thrown in with a turbulent gallery of disturbed young women. They range from a girl who tried to burn her own face off to one who won't eat anything but chicken from her father's deli (she stores the carcasses under the bed). Most of the patients are harmless, but Lisa (Angelina Jolie) a heartless, charismatic sociopath, delights in her destructive power. Jolie brings the kind of combustible sexuality to the screen that our movies, in the age of Meg Ryan have been missing for too long. As Susanna and Lisa become comrades, then enemies, Susanna becomes like a space cadet fighting a secret war with herself, and through Lisa she plays out that war. The film allows Ryder to trace Susanna's gradual emergence from her "borderline" state as she confronts the cruel truth of mental illness.

Directed with satisfying authority by James Mangold, "Girl Interrupted" is really about the thorny neurotic underside of a contemporary young woman's struggle to leave childhood behind. By the end, you feel that Ryder, at long last, has done that as an actress.

This is definitely one of the best films to deal with life inside a mental institution. This was the career maker for Angelina Jolie and it solidified Wynona Ryder's career. The person I really enjoyed in this film was Britanny Murphy as Daisy. She was a person who had a tough exterior but after you chipped away at that shell there was really a fragile little girl underneath. This film is definitely something I would watch again.

I loved this movie from on the first day I saw it. This story is so unique in its way showing the problems many people have to face when being young. The best thing about this movie is, that it's based upon the experience of the real Susanna Kaysen, which means that the story is not only real but also natural and not "brightened up" for entertainment. It shows reality as it is! The actors do a really great job and among other acting personalities we can find Whoopie Goldberg, Winona Ryder and Jared Leto which seem just perfect for the roles they embody. The story, which seems to me loving and cruel at the same time, is pictured by a wonderful musical score and great songs more or less known from those hard days known as the 60's. This movie is a MUST for everyone who is seeking for a deep, thoughtful and emotional film as well as great actors!

It's always tough in today's goal-obsessed society to be someone who isn't quite sure what they want, but woman and minorities especially have it tough, because they seem to be automatically assigned "roles" for them(if you're a woman, even today, people still ask you when you're going to get married; if you're black and look big, people ask if you're an athlete). In the 60's, author Susanna Kaysen was in a similar position; she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life, but knew she didn't quite fit into the norm. Because of that, and because of some legitimate problems(she tried to kill herself by swallowing a bottle of aspirin), she went into a mental hospital and was tagged with having "borderline personality disorder," a catch-all phrase which meant whatever the doctors wanted it to mean. From her experiences in the hospital, Kaysen wrote the book GIRL, INTERRUPTED(the title comes from a Vermeer painting), and now comes the movie version from James Mangold and Winona Ryder.

Mangold's first two films, HEAVY and COPLAND, were both about main characters leading lives of quiet desperation; the pizza chef in HEAVY unable to express himself, and the partly sheriff in COPLAND who must learn to assume his responsibility with that position. Susanna fits in with those two characters, and Mangold does just as good a job with her, except for some melodramatic scenes near the end. There are some major themes going on here, like whether Susanna is really crazy, just spoiled, or conditioned to think something is wrong with her, the nature of what "crazy" is in the 60's, and of course being a woman at the time, but Mangold avoids making big statements for the most part, instead concentrating on Susanna's growth into being a little more sure of herself.

As has been said before, Ryder brings a lot to the table, not just being a talented actress, but life research, having spent time in a hospital due to exhaustion(this is why she pulled out of GODFATHER PART III as well). And instead of going for obvious drama, she too just makes Susanna's recovery a gradual and detailed journey, except for those melodramatic scenes. The first third, which seems to be influence by SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, flashes back and forth through time, as if showing Susanna feeling lost and fragmented. The rest of the movie is more linear, but Ryder doesn't make it boring.

Some people have dismissed this as a chick ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, which is the usual knee-jerk response whenever a mostly female cast tackles what is normally done with a mostly male cast. In truth, they're very different movies, primarily because in CUCKOO, we're meant to see the hospital staff, represented by Nurse Ratched, as evil, trying to break down the patients rather than build them up. Here, on the other hand, while we're meant to see the system's shortcomings(in addition to what I said before, the different meanings of "promiscuous" when applied to men and women), the hospital staff is generally seen as trying to do the best they can. The patients may make fun of the doctors(well-played by Jeffrey Tambor and Vanessa Redgrave) and occasionally challenge the nurses(head nurse Whoopi Goldberg gives her best performance in a long time), but there's no real hatred here, except maybe from Lisa.

Angelina Jolie certainly has a flashy role with Lisa, the resident sociopath, but makes her seem real, until the movie betrays her at the end. When she's pushing people's buttons, she's actually quite sly about it, which is a lot more multi-dimensional than some have made it out to be. The rest of the cast playing patients is also good(it was a little heartbreaking seeing Elisabeth Moss playing a burn victim, especially when they show a picture of her as a young girl, where she looks like she did in IMAGINARY CRIMES). But it's Ryder who is the main reason for seeing this fine movie.