Not mad, just stupid

Rating: Null/10 (28 April 2003)

No subject has been worse treated in cinema than mental illness, and Girl, Interrupted comfortably lives down to the standard of films like The Snake Pit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the jaw-droppingly dreadful Dudley Moore comedy Crazy People. To be fair, it's bad in a mildly original way. Instead of following the "mad people are really more sane than us" line (a cruel and sentimental lie), the fantasy of mental health care as social repression (asylums as gulags of the soul), or the pop-Freudian approach popular in films of the 1940s and 1950s, it presents mental illness as a lifestyle option that marks out the really cool and interesting young person (and a great way of annoying your parents). This spark of originality, however, is what makes the film (and the book) so outstandingly detestable.
Winona Ryder's character, like most of her fellow inmates, is not mentally ill by any clinical definition. She's just bored, neurotic, self-obsessed and given to acting out little psycho-dramas to attract attention - in other words, a western-world teenager of privileged background, only more extreme than most. In time she would grow up, quit reading Sylvia Plath, and realise that other people exist. In the meantime, all the treatment she needs is some basic Dr Spock behaviour management from her parents, and maybe a stint of voluntary work with a charity that helps people with real problems.

The success of this film is a depressing comment on our narcissistic culture and an insult to the millions of mostly ordinary, unglamorous, and poor people who have to live in the miserable, frightening, and stigmatising world of mental illness.
If you want to see a film that at least tries to deal honestly and humanely with this subject, try Family Life, by Ken Loach, or Samuel Fuller's slightly sensationalist but insightful Shock Corridor. David Mamet's House of Games, though it's not about mental illness, contains a short scene in a mental hospital, in which a patient utters a single line of script that says far more about the nature of madness than the whole of Girl, Interrupted. To commit the artistic crime of altering a Bob Dylan lyric (by switching the gender words from male to female), there are a couple of lines in Visions of Johanna that sum up this repulsive film perfectly: "Little girl lost, she takes herself so seriously/ She brags of her misery, she likes to live dangerously ..." But not too dangerously, of course. Just enough to be cool.