Pretty horrible

Rating: 4/10 (25 April 2003)

The first hour or so of Girl, Interrupted is watchable, if more than a little flawed, but by the end it self-implodes quite spectacularly into an obvious and over sentimental end. It's major problem is that all the main characters are self obsessed rich girls. Very few of them seem to have any real mental illnesses, especially Winona Ryder's character. This would be acceptable if the movie showed that the doctors diagnosis was nothing more than psychobabble, but it doesn't. In fact, by the end of the movie, Ryder is 'cured' of a disease that she never even seemed to possess.
Angelina Jolie's character is portrayed as the bad girl, although she's clearly the only one there who has any acceptance of the situation she's in. And at the end, all it takes is a few well chosen words from Winona Ryder to break down the defenses she's supposed to have built up over a lifetime, and she realises the error of her ways. And Ryder's own ending is just as sloppy - a nice, happy, farewell. All of this is at first set against a backdrop of the Vietnam War, which promises to show the contrast between those being drafted to fight and the pitiful, selfish girls in the mental hospital. But that suddenly gets dropped halfway through, and the war is hardly mentioned again. It's a shame that the story itself is so ideologically contemptible because the film looks nice and the acting is superb, but that's just the way it goes sometimes.