Girl, Climbing out...

Rating: Null/10 (30 January 2000)

Borderline Personality Disorder is an often used and abused psychiatric term given to young women(and sometimes young men)when their problems can't be clearly pinpointed by the usual battery of more specifically categorized disorders. Popular in the '70's and '80's, a surprising number of individuals were labeled this way.
What this film so graphically portrays, though, is that it is actually a "hole" that one falls into when adolescence, intelligence, and the real world (so different from the childhood one that can be influenced by imagination) intersect. Climbing out of that hole is the challenge, particularly because holes are dark and one can't see the obstacles that one has placed in the hole that can hinder the process. Sheer will, determination, and learning to trust others is often the light that can illuminate that darkness.
Suzanna Kaysen says near the end of the film that she has wasted a year of her life, but in reality her life has become richer and deeper from spending that year in the way that she did. Often when one is at the surface of the hole, one feels stupid for not having seen what was there, but when pain is deep the walls used to protect one from it can be high and wide.
While Angelina Jolie's performance is astonishing and powerful, the main reason to see this film is not to see why she took home the Golden Globe. It is the fact that what you are looking at on the screen is world that no longer exists. In the modern world of money grubbing HMOs, the journey to the rim of hole is hampered by the prohibited cost of health care and unwillingness of insurance companies to pay for it. Today Suzanna would be mired in her hole and not on her way to being a well known writer.

That complaint aside, Suzanna's story teaches us that the holes that we all dig for ourselves are escapable and as the old children's rhyme states "can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it, gotta go through it." Otherwise, we will never reach the top.
There are certainly a number of differences here from the original book and that is to be expected as the flow of the story was not exactly harmonious with a transfer to film. However, the spirit of the book is still here, and that is the important thing.