Lilith Fair meets Shock Corridor

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 1999)

The Sylvia Plath wannabe sensibility gets a waify makeover as the producer-star Winona Ryder throws a pity party for herself. Based on Susanna Kaysen's spare memoir of a year-long stay in the bughouse, the movie suggests Sassy magazine on downers. Ryder is the tremulous heroine, an upper-middle-class daughter driven to the edge by status-crazed martini-sipping parents, and Angelina Jolie wears out her tomboy-cupcake vibe as the rebel hottie who flew over the cuckoo's nest. There are a handful of good scenes in the middle of the movie--in the best, Ryder and Jolie perform an impromptu version of Petula Clark's "Downtown" for a depressed patient. But when Whoopi Goldberg, the movie's designated mammy and head nurse, explodes, "You are a lazy, self-indulgent girl driving yourself crazy!" it's hard to suppress a standing cheer.
The adaptor-director James Mangold gives the producer-star more adoring closeups since Falconetti played Joan of Arc. Why is it that everyone right now seems to think Mike Nichols is the model for film direction? Mangold's work combines the caricature of THE GRADUATE with the splinters of CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, and his use of sixties music makes FORREST GUMP feel inventive. (I never again want to see a movie where the characters stare openmouthed at a TV set as Fill-in-the-Blank has just been assassinated.) The movie teaches a sigh-inducing slate of girl-power lessons. In the most tiresome, Winona turns down her bohunk boyfriend Jared Leto when he asks her to go into exile with him in Canada; she has to get better with her girlfriends, you see. By the time Winona scrawled in her journal "IF YOU WERE HERE, YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW," I knew this movie had tied GO and RUN LOLA RUN for 1999's most noxious.