James Mangold’s GIRL, INTERRUPTED (1999) [5/10]
[a young Elisabeth Moss with feline friend and Winona Ryder]
Girl, Interrupted is a kind of low-calorie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest for teenage girls. It’s a ‘target-audience’ film which isn’t really designed for the majority of cinemagoers—I found it a painless but uninvolving couple of hours, just not my kind of thing. If the subject matter interests you, give it a look. If not, there are plenty of better pictures on offer at the moment.
Based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of her late-1960s spell in a mental institution, the film is a pet project for Winona Ryder and it shows. She seems to be in every scene, and there’s very heavy use of her voice-over. She certainly has a more assertive presence than director James Mangold, whose visuals (via cinematographer Jack N Green) are muted to the point of drabness: he takes a back seat as Kaysen’s tale unfolds.
Not that it’s much of a tale. As with many memoirs, the episodic structure proves awkward on the screen. Ryder’s Susanna has difficulty settling in, gets to know the other girls, has various run-ins with authority (Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave), encounters colourful sociopath Lisa (Angelina Jolie), frets over her draft-dodging boyfriend Tobias (Jared Leto), gets to know Lisa, runs away, goes back, etc. etc. etc.
It’s all a bit by-the-numbers, and there isn’t much here that we haven’t seen in a dozen similar films before. Ryder carries the film well enough, and the eye-rolling Jolie makes the most of her juicy role, but their efforts can’t manage to lift the 127-minute enterprise out of its rut of unspectacular ordinariness.