My Evening, Interrupted

Rating: 4/10 (4 January 2000)

Addled, dull, mush-brained. Winona Ryder plays a spoiled, suicidal rich girl with what looks like a repetitive series of ticks and shakes---it's not so much a performance as an overwrought improv exercise in acting class, and not a very convincing one at that.
What we get overall is about as edgy and exciting as an episode of "Felicity" set in an isolation ward. Director James Mangold hamstrings an otherwise talented cast with a goopy, sentimental take on a all-girl's mental ward with a remarkably lax security staff (which lazily seems more to service the narrative than proving a point about the rebellious ingenuity of the gals in this perfectly groomed snake pit); breakouts seem a nightly event and after a point the setting feels more like a valium-drugged sorority than an emotionally tumultuous ward for the emotionally unravelled. For a film about mental illness, Mangold managed to flatline every moment in the film; every confrontation and revelation is staged in the dullest, enervated way possible.
Consistently, every scene announces itself with a Declaration and just as consistently there's no payoff or genuine point; Susanna's final confrontation with Lisa is a laughable dud---for all the script's flailing about Lisa's "sociopathic" ability to cut to the quick about the tiresome and self-indulgent mental peccadilloes of the brats around her, it seems unlikely that she would be so undone by Susanna's single "cutting" comment, an observation made eons ago by the audience and which could be applied to the movie itself. As for Nurse Whoopie's comment, that Susanna's just "a spoiled girl making herself crazy", would that the script itself were so clear-headed---the movie's just as guilty of indulging its characters, so unwilling to take them to task for their neuroses real or imagined, that there's no dramatic investment in sticking around until the last reel.