Hollywood Asylum

Rating: 3/10 (7 January 2007)

The problem with "Girl, Interrupted" is the treatment of its subject matter, mental illness. The film is well cast and the screenplay is reasonably sensitive, but it plays out like a Chick-Flick version of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".
Substitute Winona Ryder for Brad Dourif and Angelina Jolie for Jack Nicholson, give the film a Hollywood ending and Bam! There's another worthy little classic in the can. "Girl, Interrupted" takes no chances and delivers a literal, layman's version of mental illness, an approach which left me cold and unsympathetic to the central character.
Despite a good performance from Winona Ryder, it's clear from Day One that her character shouldn't be in a psychiatric hospital. Okay, the film is based on Susanna Kaysen's genuine experience of mental illness but her hindsight shows through in the storytelling. The character Susanna's viewpoint is too objective for someone locked up in an asylum and the other patients are too stereotypically "Mad" to be entirely believable. It's as if the story is being told by someone who suffered from mental illness a long time ago.
Angelina Jolie does her best as Lisa Rowe (the Jack Nicholson Looks-Normal Rebel character), but is let down by a script that quickly renders her as a walking cliché. It doesn't take long to work out that her rebel act will make her attractive to Ryder's character and that there's bound to be fireworks between such an odd couple. Predictably enough, after girly high-jinks give way to darker deeds, Susanna Kaysen decides that it's time to leave when Lisa Rowe finally breaks down. Kaysen then "realises" that her mental health issues aren't as severe as Rowe's, something that I'd worked out about an hour and a half earlier. Kaysen is "merely" depressed and confused, whereas Rowe is clearly borderline psychotic. It's clear from early on that one of them will soon walk back into a "normal" life while the other will have to struggle with inner demons and medication for many years.
I can't comment on Susanna Kaysen's book, but the film's viewpoint is too detached to be a credible account of a young woman's metal health problems. It wouldn't take many script changes to turn this movie into the story of a young journalist sent to an asylum to write an undercover piece for her newspaper. Although I have no doubt that the real Susanna Kaysen went through a very difficult period of mental illness as a young woman, her screen counterpart appears to be on some sort of nutter's field trip. While the film's approach may be realistic and sensitive, it conveys very little of the genuine anguish of mental illness.