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Girl, Interrupted Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 57 Reviews)

McLean Hospital
I am pretty sure that this is the first time I have ever seen a movie that was better than the book they made it about. The book is not a story at all but just facts and observations about the hospital. Where in the movie they were able to come up with a strong plot out of the book, and make the characters much more distinct. That part alone is very impressive
As for the acting, that is also very well done. This is bar far Angelina Jolies best performance I have ever seen, it seems like after this movie they all went downhill. Or maybe she only good at playing crazy, controlling people, who knows. Then there is Winona Ryder, who I dont think got enough credit for this film, her character may not have been quite as dramatic as the Lisa character, but that's because that's the way Susana was in the book, she was droopy and depressed. I personally think that she did a great job. Then there were all the side characters like Georgina, Janet, Daisy, Christina, and Whoopi Goldberg as the nurse...they all did a great job too.
I would strongly recommend this movie, it is a great portrail of a life in a mental hospital.


Don't let them take you to this film!!!!
My girlfriend talked me into seeing "Girl, Interrupted".

I went naively to the theater, willingly.

I should have gone kicking and screaming.

Not only was "Girl, Interrupted" an evening killer, it was the Charles Manson of all "Chick Flicks".

After witnessing this abortive chunk of dirt, my girlfriend of five years and I didn't talk for the rest of the evening. I escorted her home to her apartment in Lakewood, said "Good Night", and that was it.

No kiss goodnight, No "G'Night Skippy"... No nothing!

Forget about seeing this pointless piece of garbage. You'd be better off throwing your money into the gutter.

Working the System
*Girl, Interrupted* (1999) is a well-known, big-star production that garnered an Oscar (best supporting actress Angelina Jolie). A lot of reviews have been written about it. All I want to do here is to point out what the film has to say for me.

The story, set in 1967, focuses on a girl named Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) who's just graduated from high school and doesn't know what to do with the rest of her life. Life at home with her parents has become a quiet nightmare. She's gotten involved with a married professor. For Susanna it was an experiment, something to try out once. But her randy egghead wants to keep the affair going, secretly of course. Susanna feels put upon by his attentions...and a little guilty, a little dirty. The world outside looks crazy to her: the Vietnam war is raging and people of her generation are freaking out.

Susanna's looking for an escape. Blessed with a writer's imagination, she turns inward to her thoughts. There she finds strange experiences. Time gets disordered. One night the bones in her hand just vanish. Finally she swallows a bottleful of aspirin with a bottleful of vodka--but she's not sure why. This act convinces her parents and their psychiatrist friend that she's suicidal. So it's off to Claymoore for Susanna.

Claymoore is an upscale mental hospital, a tony nuthouse. She rooms with a girl who reads Wizard of Oz books over and over. Susanna begins a journal, a book of her own to lose herself in. Thus even in Claymoore she finds ways to withdraw deeper and deeper into her imagination. Susanna is dissociative (which means she separates herself from the world around her), but she's not crazy. At least, not yet.

What is crazy? That's the "big question" that *Girl, Interrupted* explores. In her journal Susanna comes up with a tempting insight: being crazy is an amplification of certain traits we all have. For example, everybody at some times tells lies. But if you tell lies all the time, that's crazy (her roommate is in Claymoore for being a pathological liar). Now, if the point of *Girl, Interrupted* is to explore the question, "What is real craziness?", then at least in my view of the movie, that exploration takes us beyond Susanna's pat answer.

*Girl, Interrupted* does not arrive at an explicit answer. It seems to leave the question open. (After all, open-endedness, or to put it more bluntly, fear of commitment, is endemic to our modern culture.) But implicitly the film tells us that as long as you can work the system, you're basically OK. Thing is, there are two systems: the one outside Claymoore and the one within. If you can work either one, you're not crazy--even though you may be "diag-nonsensed" as such by psychiatric authorities.

I think that of the main characters, it's Daisy Randone (Brittany Murphey) who is really crazy. She obviously can't cope being in Claymoore. She's friendless. She keeps herself shut up in her room, a No Tresspassing sign on the door. She refuses to eat with the other women. She lives only on chicken that comes to her room from her father's deli. We don't learn about Daisy's mother; she doesn't seem to figure at all. Mr. Randone, apparently, treats his daughter as his wife--even sexually. Anyway, it turns out that Daisy gets an "in recovery" release from Claymoore. Not because she got better, but because her doctors gave up. Her father sets her up in an apartment where she can live in her own little world of chicken in the fridge and wicker butterflies on the wall. In short, Daisy can't work the system outside Claymoore either. She can't do anything for herself. She's just a pet, "the cocker spaniel that eats spaghetti."

In a scene that's become famous to *Girl, Interrupted*, Daisy ends up killing herself.

Lisa Rowe (Angelina Jolie) is diag-nonsensed a sociopath. But if being crazy means the inability to cope with the system, she is not that. Lisa moves (by escaping and being returned) from Claymoore to the world outside and back. In either system she knows how to take care of herself and thus remain very much her own person.

Lisa is dissociative in the sense that she doesn't fit for long in any world. But her dissociation is visceral, unlike Susanna's, which is intellectual. Lisa is chased from one world to another and back by her flaming rage. (It's curious, though, that in the deleted scenes feature of the DVD, we get a glimpse of a book and some papers on Lisa's bed. The book (ah...books are symbols in this movie) appears to be about math. It looks as if Lisa's been working on equations. Thus she may have her own intellectual ivory tower that from time to time she escapes into. Well, Jolie characters are often full of surprises!)

In a talk therapy session, Dr. Melvin Potts asks Susanna why she looks puzzled. Her answer is that she can't understand why she's in this place full of crazy people. He asks her if this means she wants to go back home to her family. "Same problem," she replies. The lesson of *Girl, Interrupted* seems to be that the problem is really Susanna's alone. She's become so dissociative that there's a danger her tenuous link to both Claymoore and "normal" society may snap. THAT would be crazy.

It's ironic that Lisa, the sociopath, halts Susanna's drift into the Daisy-zone of utter helplessness. Of all the inmates of the women's ward, Lisa is the manipulative charge-taker. Her way of getting the people around her out of their headtrips and down to business serves as a healthy kick in the butt for Susanna. The difficulty is that the business Lisa gets down to is self-destructive, though at the get-go it seems like fun. It takes Daisy's suicide to drive this home to Susanna. Thereafter Susanna takes charge of her own life and gets down to the business of earning her release.

I think that in the touching scene at the end, where we watch Susanna paint Lisa's nails (Lisa's in the isolation room under four-point restraints), Susanna is as much thanking Lisa for the good she did as she is saying goodbye. Lisa sobs, "I'm gonna miss you, Suzie Q"--but Susanna's reply is a firm reminder that Lisa is not really crazy. She has what it takes to get out. She's not helpless. She knows how to work the system.

As she sighs in assent, Lisa's teary eyes turn away from Susanna to gaze off into her own thoughts. The impression here is that Lisa is reflecting on the life she's chosen for herself. Perhaps this is the first time she's facing the fact that it's not somebody else's fault she's confined to a mental institution. Therefore, in turn, it won't be somebody else's credit when she's released. Lisa's fate is in Lisa's own hands.

*Girl, Interrupted* is one of those few movies that still gets a hold on me no matter how many times I've seen it. I give it five stars just for that--even though I don't much care for the confrontation scene between Susanna and Lisa in the Claymoore basement. I mean, the basic idea of a confrontation is OK, but Susanna's reaction isn't. Lisa swiped her journal and is reading it aloud to a couple other girls--so what? That journal is the record of Susanna's journey through Claymoore...and tomorrow she's getting out. If she's really better now, if the content of that journal (the book of her flirtation with madness) is really behind her, why does Susanna get all upset and hiss at Lisa, "That's mine!"?

I suppose the scriptwriters would reply that her reaction shows that Susanna still has a button in her psyche that Lisa can push. The only way she can get free is to pass through the dramatic emotional catharsis that this scene plays out between the two protagonists. Sorry, it's not convincing. After a screaming run through the dark corridors, Susanna whirls and shouts at Lisa that she's just dead inside and needs Claymoore to feel alive. Lisa abruptly collapses, bawling like a wounded calf. Suddenly everything's OK. Yeah, right.

I'd prefer to have seen Susanna keep her cool as she patiently explains to Lisa that her journal contains private thoughts coming from a time of Susanna's confusion--a time she was locked up in the crazy house! I think Lisa would have lost it anyway, because in effect Susanna would be telling her, "Hey girl, that journal is full of crazy sh*t, and if you take it as seriously as you are now, it just means you're nuts." Plus by keeping her cool, Susanna would show Lisa that she's stronger than her. Lisa would take that as a threat. She'd be enraged and attack, injure Susanna's hand for her, and end up in isolation. The scene of Susanna coming the next day to paint Lisa's fingernails would have carried even more power than it does. It would emphasize all the more that Susanna is, at one and the same time, putting away all the madness she found in Claymoore, and keeping with her all the good.

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