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Cineaste, Summer 2000 v25 i3 p48
Girl, Interrupted. (Review)_(movie review) Alice Goss. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Cineaste Publishers, Inc.
Produced by Douglas Wick and Cathy Konrad; directed by James Mangold; screenplay by James Mangold and Anna Hamilton Phelan, based on the book by Susanna Kaysen; cinematography by Jack Green; production design by Richard Hoover; edited by Kevin Tent; music by Mychael Danna; costume design by Arianne Phillips; starring Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Clea Duvall, Brittany Murphy, Elisabeth Moss, Whoopi Goldberg, Vanessa Redgrave and Jared Leto. Color, 127 mins. A Columbia Pictures release. A Columbia TriStar homevideo release.
It is easy to see the appeal of Girl, Interrupted for young middle-class women, especially those who gravitate to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The protagonist Susanna (Winona Ryder), a would-be writer, and her fellow inmates at Claymore Hospital in the early Seventies, find release in the 'parallel universe' of the madhouse. No longer expected to act as adults, they empower themselves by outsmarting the nurses and taking illicit nighttime jaunts through the bowels of the hospital. They smoke constantly, swear, bully and console each other, and do so without apology, without embarrassment. After all, they're crazy. They don't have to hide their aggressions, their anger, their wish to regress to childhood. Instead of directing their rage inward, as our society acculturates young women to do, or committing themselves politically in this volatile period, they act out, in the safety of the hospital, in fits of self-assertion and bravura wit.
The film, directed by James Mangold, with Ryder as executive producer, emphasizes again and again Susanna's control over what happens. She may have a "borderline personality disorder" now, but she can step over that border if she wants and become an "orderly" adult of her own creation. Both Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg), the self-contained head nurse on her ward, and Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), the genteel psychiatrist who treats her, assure Susanna that it is within her power to choose between madness and sanity, that she is "driving herself crazy." She may hide away in anger and confusion for awhile, but even the cabby who drives her to the hospital warns her, "Don't get too comfortable." (That Clay-more is a renamed McLean's--home to various celebrity breakdowns, James Taylor's among them--adds an aura of 'privilege' to Susanna's madness.) The trick, then, is to find the balance between leaving the safety of "this 5-star hotel" too soon and giving way too fully to madness, lessons not internalized by Daisy ( Britanny Murphy), who commits suicide after signing herself out, and Lisa (Angelina Jolie), the eight-year resident who, Susanna realizes at the end, "need[s] this place to feel alive."
So, what kind of vision of madness is this? Although we see various characters taking medication, there is no mention of it as part of treatment; we see precious little therapy. In Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir of the same title, the author spends much time investigating what was wrong with her. The book begins or ends various chapters with pages from her medical file; she describes the drugged, heavy feeling that is depression; she speculates on the role of pharmaceuticals in treatment, on the difference between treating the brain and treating the mind.
None of this makes its way into the movie. Instead, what is emphasized is Susanna's deciding what kind of woman she will be, and in this arena there are indeed contradictory, maddening messages, though more for the viewer than the character.
The young women on the ward--there seems to be no patient over twenty-one-- are a loosely bound, dysfunctional sorority. At first it seems that all they have is each other, so that by the time Susanna's boyfriend arrives and encourages her to run away to Canada with him--as if mental health were a woman's Vietnam--she is clear that this is her community and his dilemma is nothing in comparison to hers.
The queen of the ward is Lisa, whose madness is electrifying and whose fearlessness energizes Susanna. In this small, closed-off world, she becomes the group's Bernardine Dohrn, periodically breaking free of the hospital, then bearing the Isolation Ward lockup with proper hauteur. This cadre of women, however, is not really allied in opposition to anything and proves disloyal to its own. On one escapade Lisa and Susanna crash at Daisy's modest row house, a gift from her incestuous father upon her discharge from Claymore. Lisa torments Daisy--whose denial of her illness and her Father's abuse Lisa cannot abide--until the fragile young woman hangs herself in despair. Lisa, in monstrous indifference, takes money from Daisy's purse and heads off for good times.
Later, back in the hospital, Lisa betrays Susanna by stealing her journal and showing other patients the 'objective' observations she had written about each. In the showdown between the two women, after the others have distanced themselves from her, Susanna realizes that she has "wasted a year of [her] life" and decides to follow treatment and take herself back into the world.
Once again, it is interesting to note the way in which screenwriter/director Mangold has altered the events in the memoir. There, Daisy commits suicide soon after leaving the hospital and in the absence of any contact with Susanna and Lisa. Also, near the end of the book, Susanna runs into Lisa and her small son in Harvard Square and discovers that she's acquired all the trappings of middle-class life: "I've got the kid. I take the kid to nursery school, I've got an apartment, I've got furniture."
Why demonize Lisa in the movie? Why can't Susanna's healing stem from these friendships, born of common confusion and vulnerability, instead of in rejection of them? Why pit one woman against another instead of showing how each must find her own way to survive and prosper?
Women in the movie seem to feel no solidarity. In fact, it is suggested that Susanna's "chasing a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of whiskey" is the fallout of a transgression against a friend of her mother's. Susanna slept with the woman's husband, and, overcome with the confusion of this affair, punishes herself with destructive behavior.
In a different kind of womanly betrayal, she is taken to the office of the psychiatrist who commits her to the "prison" of the mental hospital by her mother, who declines to tell Susanna where they are going, then leaves without saying goodbye or acknowledging what is happening. No wonder Susanna tells the admitting doctor that she does not want to be like her mother, though the alternate roles she sees do not appeal to her, either. "I'm not going to burn my bra."
Initially, Girl, Interrupted purports to be feminist, acknowledging Susanna's desire for independence of thought, as well as sexual independence, which partially translates into a desire for emotional independence from men. Yet her 'promiscuity' is cited by the male psychiatrist who commits her as one cause of her madness. The film neither attempts to explore the cultural implications of such a pronouncement nor the absence of solidarity among the women as possibly rooted within their disempowered status--not as mad women but simply as women.
The only genuinely caring adult female with whom Susanna interacts is the nurse, Valerie. Whoopi Goldberg, in the caretaker mode she has played once too often, has her character bear up under the misbehavior of her coddled patients with weary, knowing dignity. One might, in fact, see Valerie as the antithesis of the volatile Lisa. Where Lisa is all Id, Valerie is only Superego. Even when the young women hurl racial insults at her, she remains in control, acting as she ought, not as we would hope she might like.
That race is introduced at all is puzzling. The Valerie of the memoir is not African-American, but "looked a lot like Lisa." One could, of course, cast an actor of color into a role without altering her nature or function in the story, but to highlight race and class, as Mangold does in several scenes, is to change how the viewer perceives everything. The lost, troubled young woman suddenly turns ugly racist; her stay in the exclusive hospital becomes clear evidence of her privileged status and her remoteness from the struggles of women of less affluence. And the woman Susanna might see as a clear model and genuine friend becomes Other.
The film does not acknowledge any of these confusions. In fact, the superficial feminism displayed in Susanna's early voiceovers is echoed once again in her final reflections, as she pays tribute to Lisa, Daisy, and the others at Claymore. "They weren't perfect, but they were my friends."
Such shallow bonds, existing more in sentimental declaration than in action or thought, would be unlikely in a 'buddy' film, where events would bond the men irrevocably, no matter how much at odds they might find themselves at some point. In this film, it's every woman for herself.
Alice Cross teaches high school English. Named Works: Girl, Interrupted (Motion picture) | |||
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