One of James Mangold's finest films

Rating: 10/10 (8 March 2017)

James Mangold's "Girl, Interrupted" is the best film that I have seen about disabled people since "Rain Man" (1988) but the key difference between those two films is that this movie is based on true events. The movie stars Winona Ryder as Susanna Kaysen who wrote the book that this movie was adapted from and it talks about her time and experience in a mental hospital in the 1960's but at first it isn't that easy for her to make many friends. During her first few days the only person she really trusts is the supervising nurse named Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) whose job is very difficult and Goldberg's character is the polar opposite of Nurse Ratched who was played by Louise Fletcher in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975). As her time in the hospital progresses Susanna meets a girl named Georgina (Clea Duvall), and then meets a girl who everyone really gets annoyed with and despises at times is a girl named Lisa (Angelina Jolie) who has a really bad attitude. Then in one scene we see Kaysen's boyfriend named Tobias Jacobs (Jared Leto) who is trying to sneak Susanna out of the hospital but Susanna refuses. Other friends that Susanna happens to make are girls named Daisy (Brittany Murphy), Polly (Elisabeth Moss) and others. The reason why Susanna Kaysen was sent to the hospital in the first place was because she was very suicidal which she was sent there by a psychiatrist named Dr. Potts (Jeffrey Tambor). The other doctor in the mental hospital has a very weird last name and her name is Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), the movie has an excellent cast and great performances throughout which are so good because it really makes you empathize with each and every one of the characters and we feel like we are actually there getting to know them. As the great Roger Ebert once said that "For me the movies are a machine that generates empathy, it helps to understand hopes, dreams, aspirations and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us." and that is exactly how I felt with this and many other movies. Despite this movie being one of the best films of 1999 it isn't the very best movie that James Mangold ever directed (that would be "Walk the Line" (2005) which also happened to be a biopic). James Mangold has done a very good by making this movie just focus on the characters and their feelings instead of just shedding a bad light on them as people even though we know their problems are bad just like Barry Levinson did with "Rain Man" 11 years before this movie was made. This was a truly great movie but as a warning it might only be worth watching once.