A whole lotta emotin' (and smokin') goin' on

Rating: Null/10 (12 June 2000)

"Girl, Interrupted" (**1/2) seems to have been designed by Winona Ryder as an Oscar grabbing vehicle for herself. Young woman recovering from an emotional breakdown in a posh mental hospital? Can't miss. She must have been royally miffed when Angelina Jolie ran off with the award instead (poor Winona wasn't even nominated). Truth to tell, Miss Ryder is a little whiny and tiresome as a "spoiled, self-indulgent little girl" (as Whoopi Goldberg in her wise oracle mode describes her). It's never quite clear what her problem is other than that she would rather write than go to college and that her mother doesn't appear to like her very much. (She won't even accompany her daughter to the institution; she has to go over in a cab!) Miss Jolie has also been indulged by director James Mangold to showboat all over the place in a sort of female Jack Nicholson role as the toughest cookie in the place. Now if someone had only known that all it took to break her was to tell her she was coldhearted and dead inside, she wouldn't have been in there for eight years! Implausibilities abound: Security appears to be largely non-existent and the girls seem to have the run of the place. In one absurd sequence they adjourn to the basement for some bowling and then break into the head doctor's office to check out their files. When Ryder wants to get a musical instrument out of the supply room after hours she simply asks Jolie for the keys! Generally, the film is well made: director Mangold interweaves the flashbacks that dot the first half-hour in a very skillful manner; for once, I felt that I could even keep track of what was going on. The film is absorbing in the manner of such flamboyant mental institution/prison melodramas of yore as "The Snake Pit", "Caged, " "The Caretakers" or "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden." I just didn't buy most of it, the ultra-sentimental wrap-up least of all.