Winona's best since "Mermaids"

Rating: 7/10 (14 February 2000)

Some actors are stage actors....and are born to perform on the stage... but Winona Ryder is the most perfectly natural Screen Actress in every sense of the word; she does not even need the theatrical outbursts of speech other actresses needed to demonstrate their acting skills. A bit of fire and tears in the eyes is all she needs ( and what eyes, too!! ) to make her "speak", the two alternating in varying degrees of intensity, sometimes simultaneously, and always meaningfully.
"Girl, Interrupted" is neither a work of genius nor a great piece of art by any means. There is more affected cinematic technique and style in it than can be over-looked; much of the montage and the editing is pseudo-'great director', with the names of all the great directors between the parentheses. But what saves it all is the scenario...it has life in it; for a film version of a singularly unfilmable subject, there is a surprising level of "no-nonsense" in the screen play.
Susanna Kaysen is an eighteen-year-old who finds herself feeling out of harmony with the society she grew up in and has been part of all her life...depressed, sad and unwell, she takes too many aspirins for the good of either the head-ache or her health. The 'Powers That Be' decide she needs to get oriented back into normalcy in an asylum, where she meets enough disoriented people to give her not only a new vantage view-point of herself and her condition, but also feelings of attachment strong enough for her to cherish. The events that shape the lives of her co-occupants of the asylum and the experiences she shares with them, albeit in a slightly observant role (as befits an aspiring writer), are both purgatory for her and embalming...she comes out of it having obtained enough answers to determine which of the two worlds was more appropriate for her, the closed asylum or the 'stupid' outside world.
The film works only because Winona Ryder could make us SEE every impression each incident made on her within the asylum, and how each occurrence was turning her mental compass to a semblance of normalcy, to the extent that any sane, passionate person could ever be 'normal' enough.

My rating: 7/10