Interrupted
Girl Interrupted Notes:
There's an interesting and effective shift in viewer perceptions created by Girl, Interrupted, a film based on Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her time in a psychiatric hospital during the 1960's. When Susanna (played by Winona Ryder) downs a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka, her parents send her to see a psychiatrist friend. Why they go through this charade is unclear - they've already agreed with the shrink that she is to be committed. She doesn't know it yet, but her bag has been packed and is waiting for her in a taxi parked at the curb. (Her parents are so self-protective that they won't even take her to the hospital; mother Kaysen waves good bye tentatively from her car parked safely across the street. No wonder the girl's a mess.)
So the audience has been recruited immediately to Susanna's side, sympathizing with her against selfish, emotionally distant parents and manipulative shrinks. Once at the hospital, the cliches fly fast and furious, but that's probably inevitable given the setting: the institutional building, the authoritative staff, the restricted privileges, the sedation of patients, patient rebellions, and the range of disorders and strange behaviors. It's almost a required packet of ingredients for a psychiatric hospital flick (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Snake Pit), the way multi-ethnic squads with measured numbers of heroes and cowards once was for war movies.
We still see it through Susanna's eyes, and share in her cynicism and horror at the situation in which she finds herself. With a few flashbacks to fill us in on some of her past experiences, the balance of the film is essentially a series of incidents in her experience at the hospital. Therein lies both the strength and the weakness of Girl, Interrupted. The weakness is the lack of any central conflict in the story; the episodic structure lacks any real dramatic momentum and at over two hours running time, it...
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