Hard not to be won over

Rating: 8/10 (3 August 2000)

Maybe it's time for me to take another look at "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - I don't remember it being particularly good, certainly not as good as this. Forman may be a better director than Mangold, but there's little evidence he can tell good material from bad. (Sometimes he stumbles across good material by accident, and the result is an "Amadeus".) "Girl, Interrupted" is a film that actually cares about making US care about the inmates. I found myself growing very fond of Susanna and Lisa despite taking an intense initial dislike to both - how much more agreeable the company of the mad but intelligent is to that of the sane but stupid, I found myself thinking - and in no time at all I was hooked, and moved. And unless my memory plays me false this is also a SMARTER film than "Cuckoo", as well as being a more touching one.
Okay, Mangold does have his weaknesses. Anyone who has to resort to a song montage might as well hold up a title card saying "I don't know how to portray the passage of time"; the last fifteen minutes appears to consist of five consecutive endings (Forman ended HIS film cleanly, I'll give him that); and while we may have needed Susanna's first-person narration to lead us into the story, we certainly didn't need it to lead us out. It's easy to forgive all of this. Besides, Mangold has positive virtues to compensate: he knows how to pace, and, as I said before, he knows how to make us love the characters.
I should mention few incidental pleasures. One of them, surprisingly, is Whoopi Goldberg. Who would have thought it, but she actually portrays a character that isn't her usual arch, smug one, in a role in which it would have been easy to lapse into arch smugness - and she does it well. Also, you'll have to admit, "Girl, Interrupted" is a great title. How could anyone NOT bear good will to a film with a title like that? Moreover, "Downtown" is a great song; I don't care who knows I think so.