Trailer, via Oscars.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Title: Girl, Interrupted
- Year: 1999
- Director: James Mangold
- Writers: Lisa Loomer, James Mangold, Anna Hamilton Phelan
- Based on: Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir
- Runtime: 127 minutes
- US release: December 21, 1999
- Worldwide gross: $48 million
- Published critical score: 5.3/10 (Rotten Tomatoes 53%)
- Top award: Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Angelina Jolie
Girl, Interrupted has spent nearly three decades as a shorthand for a certain kind of performance. Angelina Jolie won an Oscar for it. That fact has outlived almost everything else about the movie, and it has done the film a disservice. The award frames James Mangold’s 1999 adaptation of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir as a showcase, a star turn dropped into a psychiatric ward. Watch it again and the real problem is not Jolie. It is that the film around her never decides what it wants to be: a case study, a coming-of-age story, or a tour of other people’s suffering.
Susanna Kaysen Checks Into Claymoore
The setup comes straight from the memoir. In 1967, in New England, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen has an acute psychiatric episode and overdoses on aspirin and alcohol. A psychiatrist she has met only once prescribes a “short rest.” Against her wishes, she is checked into Claymoore, a psychiatric hospital. She stays eighteen months.
That gap — the short rest that becomes a year and a half — is the film’s sharpest idea. Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a fact Dr. Melvin Potts initially conceals from her. The movie knows that the line between normal and crazy is thin and badly lit. It says so in its tagline: “Sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”
It rarely dramatizes the idea with the same clarity.
Winona Ryder plays Susanna as watchful and withdrawn, a narrator who observes the ward more than she inhabits it. It is a controlled performance, and a limiting one. Ryder’s Susanna is the audience’s escort through Claymoore, which means she is often reacting rather than acting. The film asks her to be the sane one in a room full of diagnoses, and that is a smaller job than the part deserves.
Lisa Rowe Owns the Ward
Jolie’s Lisa Rowe is the reason the movie still gets discussed. Lisa is a diagnosed sociopath, charismatic, manipulative, rebellious and abusive. She has been institutionalized since she was twelve and has escaped several times over her eight years there, always caught and brought back. The other patients look up to her. Susanna forms a close bond with her.
Jolie plays her as a live wire with no off switch, and the performance has an unmistakable physical charge. She slouches, she prowls, she invades other people’s space and dares them to complain. The Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was not a mistake. Neither were the Golden Globe, the Critics’ Choice Movie Award or the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role. Jolie found something feral in a script that otherwise keeps its patients at arm’s length.
But the movie’s structure bends around her. Lisa encourages Susanna to stop taking her medication and resist therapy. She leads the girls through the hospital’s underground tunnels at night. She provokes the other patients and the staff, including the stern head nurse, Valerie Owens, played by Whoopi Goldberg. Lisa is the engine of nearly every scene worth remembering, which means the film’s center of gravity sits with its most destructive character. That is a choice, and it is not obviously the right one for a story about a woman trying to get out.
Daisy Randone and the Cost of the Ward
The supporting cast is deep and mostly underused. Clea DuVall plays Georgina Tuskin, a pathological liar and Susanna’s seventeen-year-old roommate. Brittany Murphy plays Daisy Randone, an eighteen-year-old with obsessive-compulsive disorder who self-harms and is addicted to laxatives, and who hides the carcasses of cooked chickens her father brings her. Elisabeth Moss plays Polly “Torch” Clark, a sixteen-year-old burn victim with schizophrenia. Angela Bettis plays Janet Webber, a sardonic woman with anorexia nervosa. Jillian Armenante plays Cynthia Crowley, who has severe depression.
Murphy’s Daisy is the film’s most disturbing thread and its most truncated. Daisy is discharged, and she later kills herself by hanging. The movie treats this as a plot beat rather than a reckoning, and the effect is queasy. Daisy’s suffering is real in the source material and in Murphy’s performance, but the film uses her death to shake Susanna awake. A young woman’s suicide becomes a lesson for the protagonist. That is a cheap trade, and Girl, Interrupted makes it without appearing to notice.
The film also struggles with the outside world. Jared Leto plays Tobias Jacobs, Susanna’s ex-boyfriend, who plans to escape to Canada after being drafted into the military. Their scenes together are slack and vague, in part because the film has no real interest in the Vietnam War beyond its function as background noise. The ward is the movie. Everything past the doors is a rumor.
Barbara Gilcrest and the Ice Cream Parlor
The best-constructed scene in the film is a group outing. On a rare supervised trip celebrating Daisy’s impending discharge, the women visit an ice cream parlor. Susanna is confronted by Barbara Gilcrest, the wife of an English instructor with whom Susanna had an affair, and their daughter, Bonnie. Barbara publicly chastises Susanna for sleeping with her husband.
Lisa comes to Susanna’s defense and insultingly berates Barbara. The other girls mock Bonnie, and mother and daughter leave humiliated. Valerie reprimands Lisa afterward. The scene works because it puts the ward’s private logic into public view: the patients close ranks, and the cruelty that holds them together is suddenly aimed outward. It also endears Lisa to Susanna even more, which is the point. The film understands that charisma is not the same as kindness, and that Susanna cannot yet tell the difference.
It is one of the few times the movie lets its characters be ugly without asking us to find them tragic. Most of the rest of the running time is spent on atmosphere. The tunnels, the group therapy, the medication refusals, the head nurse’s reprimands — all of it is rendered competently by Mangold, who keeps the camera close and the pacing even. At 127 minutes, though, the film has room it does not use. Whole characters exist as diagnoses with a single scene attached.
What the Casting Says About 1999
The film’s production history is its own artifact. Because of the volume of strong female characters, a number of young actresses sought parts. Reese Witherspoon, Christina Ricci, Katie Holmes, Gretchen Mol, Kate Hudson, Alicia Witt, Sarah Polley and Rose McGowan all auditioned for unspecified roles. Rose McGowan’s 1998 comment about the material is blunt and telling: “It’s the only decent thing out there that doesn’t involve taking your clothes off.”
Parker Posey turned down the role of Lisa. Leelee Sobieski signed on to play Daisy but dropped out weeks before filming began after receiving an offer to star in Joan of Arc. Mangold met with Courtney Love about the role of Lisa and with Alanis Morissette about a role. Brittany Murphy was announced as part of the cast in November. A film with this many near-misses is a film that was cast against the grain of its moment, and that shows on screen. The actresses are the reason to watch. The screenplay is the reason the film does not hold.
The Verdict on Girl, Interrupted
Girl, Interrupted grossed $48 million worldwide and received mixed reviews. The reviews were right about the performances and wrong about almost nothing else. Ryder, Jolie and Murphy were singled out for praise, and they earn it. Jolie’s Oscar is the film’s lasting legacy, and the award is defensible on its own terms.
The problem is that the film never earns its ending. Susanna ultimately has to choose between the world of people who belong inside and the difficult world of reality outside. That choice should be the whole movie. Instead it arrives as a formality, because the film has spent its energy on Lisa’s chaos rather than Susanna’s judgment. The result is a movie that is more interested in the ward than in the woman leaving it. Jolie’s performance is the part worth watching. The film around her is a 5.3 of 10.
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