Girl, Interrupted (dir. James Mangold, 2000) — Review

Grimly determined to quash any fun, sleepaway camp notions one might have of a ‘grippy sock vacation’, Girl, Interrupted could easily be miconstrued as the Simple Life meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Led by unreliable narrators, crafted from the personal experience of their authors, both Girl and Cuckoo put a suitably lurid spin on the experience of mental health treatment. Susanna Kaysen, played by Winona Ryder, turned her two years in the psych ward into a Poundland Bell Jar. Director James Mangold’s all-star Hollywood version captures the empty yet seductive nature of madness for teenage girls- namely, the timeless glam of being hot, young and crazy. Yet, with its deeply personal depiction of mental illness, alongside a Rolodex of 2000s tits on sticks at the peak of their powers, the film probably touched quite a few people who missed the joke.

Directed and cowritten by Mangold, Girl, Interrupted presents a sexy view of a mental hospital alongside the Lana del Rey nuances of mental illness, and the ways in which societal structures dehumanise “crazy” people. With Mangold taking up the real-life Kaysen’s account, what should be a Dantean descent of an ordinary, middle-class protagonist into the purgatory of the loony bin becomes a sincere but overly indulgent exploration of the manic pixie dream girl fantasy.

Despite its period setting, Girl, Interrupted remains salient to many agonies of the American teenager. With authority and social institutions failing them at every turn- from neglectful parents to the Vietnam war draft- how can rebellion, or the rejection of social norms, make our protagonist insane? Susanna’s expository flashbacks to a stomach-churning encounter with an adult family friend provide a blunt, sober window onto the norm before MeToo, and, indeed, a norm which continues today. Crippled by both the shame of the experience and the fact that no one believes her, Susanna downs a cocktail of pills and booze; her parents don’t sign her into the institution, but leave it to another friend, the psychiatrist, to shame her into doing so herself.

Girl, Interrupted doesn’t box the experience of mental illness into anything simplistic like family trauma, or as something which Susanna can wrestle her way through with medication; rather, the audience realises alongside her that the world can be an ugly, unmagical place. Susanna is right, it suggests, to be horrified and disgusted by the ‘real world’, to the point of wanting to leave it. She processes that feeling and decides to face the world, regardless. Unfortunately, this notionally clear-eyed narrative comes undone under the roaring sexual tension of a sapphic sleepaway romp; it’s easy to romanticise mental illness when you have the most attractive women of the most viciously image-conscious era in recent history, putting their all into every doe-eyed cigarette puff.

While Ryder shoulders her accustomed outsider role with aplomb, she serves primarily as a blank slate on which the film can project the misogynistic attitudes of the psychiatric establishment. Aside from the ‘promisciously’ labelled Susanna, most of the women on the ward have deep issues. On the hot side, Daisy (Britanny Murphy) is obsessed with laxatives and roast chicken and likely sexually abused by her father; Lisa (Angelina Jolie) a charismatic sociopath who becomes Susanna's partner in crime, leads her down the rabbit hole with miserable results. Jolie's rabidly seductive performance captures the otherwordly allure of this selfish yet brutal Cassandra, a broken clock which tells the truth twice a day, albeit to serve its own interest.

Valerie, the no-nonsense nurse played by Whoopi Goldberg, patiently endures Susanna's racist insults, while the chief psychiatrist, Dr. Wick, (Vanessa Redgrave) embodies wisdom and compassion. Both offer caricatures of ‘good medicine’ just as ridiculous and over the top as the evil men or the spicy nutcases; unfortunately, for this reason, Goldberg and Redgrave stick out as the least convincing in the busty puppet Punch and Judy.

After Lisa’s murderous nympho breakdown (but kudos to Jolie for a performance that would make anyone side with Brad Pitt) the film is summed up in one line, when Susanna declares: "Maybe everybody out there is a liar. And maybe the whole world is "stupid" and "ignorant". But I'd rather be in it. I'd rather be fucking in it, then down here with you." This major breakthrough acknowledges her own failures and the shortcomings of the world outside, but she realises that the only way out is to deal with it- and plod on unsexily.

Despite having the characters bend to the needs of the plot after an hour or so of character-driven storytelling, the contrived escape lends the narrative a modicum of teenage credibility . The taste of the outside world that Susanna experiences with Lisa and Daisy is bittersweet, and what joy they experience from their release is short-lived, shattered by Daisy's demise and Lisa's callous attitude towards it.

The fairy tale world doesn’t exist- inside or out. Real life offers a different kind of prison, albeit one with many different ways of dealing with what ails us. As Susanna prepares to leave the psychiatric hospital that has been her home for the grippy sock vacation, she finds the strength to confront realities, bolstered by the expensive joys of outpatient care and middle class privilege. Her erstwhile friend Lisa, meanwhile, is confined to solitary confinement after yet another escape attempt.

The contrast between Susanna's impending freedom and Lisa's continued captivity raises serious questions about the nature of mental illness and the effectiveness of institutionalisation. Is there hope for those, like Lisa, who seem incapable of conforming to society's norms? And what of those, like Susanna, without the means who may have simply fallen through the cracks?