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Girl Interrupted Review by
Cynthia Fuchs
There's
something ever-fascinating about teen-aged girls in trouble. Novels,
autobiographies, songs, TV shows, and movies all love to prod and poke at the
traumas of growing up female. Surely, the social and political frameworks have
changed over years, as have promotional strategies and production methods --
said girls have appeared at risk from reefer madness, bad boys driving
convertibles or riding motorcycles, drug dealers or pimps, pregnancy, sadistic
teachers, jungle wildlife, aliens from outer space, high school prom queens,
serial killers, lascivious relatives, even icebergs -- but the fundamental idea,
the girl in trouble, seems remarkably consistent. That
this trouble -- especially when fictionalized or otherwise shaped for general
consumption -- often takes the form of "personal" crisis (you know,
sex-race-gender-class-age identity issues, concerns about fitting in) makes
sense, in that the crisis is usually resolved by a return from internal anxiety
to domestic comfort, and so, the girl's social and domestic surroundings can be
judged okay. Sometimes the girl's own story is dynamite, revealing defects in
these surroundings, say, the cultural expectations of girls are traditionally
and typically abusive and exploitative -- think The Bell Jar or I
Never Promised You A Rose Garden. But if this same story is translated for
mass media, the conclusion is all about reestablishing the logic of the
familiar, not to mention ensuring that the girl is complacent and cozy in her
place. I
had a feeling that Girl, Interrupted would be more of the same. And yet,
I confess, I was looking forward to seeing it, hoping that it would be
different. I know I should know better. But I see how I came to feel optimistic.
Take, for example, the title, which suggests a
certain self-consciousness about this process of coming into being
(though, looking back, I can see that the becoming is only supposed to be
interrupted, not derailed, which was the plot I had in mind...). I had heard
good things about (but admittedly, hadn't read) Susanna Kaysen's acclaimed book.
And, okay, I probably hoped that the director, James Mangold, who made the
quietly sensitive Heavy and the decidedly non-standard cop movie Copland
would come through with something without clichés. And then, I admit it, was
likely blinded by my abiding affection for the film's primary girl stars, the
lovely Winona Ryder and the radiant Angelina Jolie: they're both surprising,
intelligent, and elastic performers, and so, I may have figured, they may come
through even if the movie doesn't. I
see now that the warning signs were in place before I went to the theater. The
feel-good soundtrack (including the Doors, Petula Clark's "Downtown,"
Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin) is marketing a strange nostalgia
for a time and place -- 1967, US -- when, really, life usually sucked for girls.
Then there's the ad campaign, featuring that fabulously large Winona Face,
jaggedly ripped across the middle, which is dramatic to the point of silliness.
And --perhaps worst of all -- the credits list includes Whoopi Goldberg and
Vanessa Redgrave, both respected performers, of course, but not prone -- at
least lately -- to selecting strong material (remember Redgrave in The House
of the Spirits, Deep Impact, or Mission Impossible?).
And Whoopi: when was the last time she had a role where she wasn't
patiently instructing the ridiculous and frighteningly obtuse white folks in
moral matters? In
Girl, Interrupted, Goldberg plays Nurse Valerie, a character whose very
name gives away her function. Nurse Valerie is the chief Day Nurse at Claymoore
Hospital, outside Boston, a place where girls in trouble are, so to speak,
therapized and medicated (and sometimes electro-shocked) back into normalcy. The
patient who leads us into this suburban house of horrors is Susanna (Ryder),
whose crime against the local tranquility appears to be "chasing a bottle
of aspirin with a bottle of vodka," as well as some previous acting out in
the form of acting depressed, not doing her homework, being
"promiscuous" (though the only "boyfriend" we see is Jared
Leto, obviously not someone with whom viewers are supposed to have problems),
and oh yeah, sleeping with one of her high school teachers (who apparently never
gets caught out, and whose wife [Mary Kay Place] blames little tramp Susanna).
Given all this background, Dr. Crumble (!) suggests to Susanna's distraught
parents that she be sent away for "rest" and
"rehabilitation" (the fact that Crumble is played by the
always-invidious Kurtwood Smith sets him up as the villain straight-up). Once
at Claymoore, Susanna makes the acquaintance of various stock loony-bin
characters, slightly torqued to resemble teenaged girls. There's the incessant
liar Georgina (Clea Duvall, also a girl misfit in The Faculty); incest
victim Daisy (Brittany Murphy, Alicia Silverstone's "project" in
Clueless); terminally fearful Polly (Elisabeth Moss), who seems to have tried to
burn her own face off. And then there's Lisa (Jolie), the requisite wild child
and Claymoore veteran, repeatedly escaping and being hauled back in, so that she
might be doped up and duly scolded for her misconduct. Lisa is gorgeous,
passionate, and energetic, especially compared to the scared-into-obedience
girls, who have no obvious capacity for the courage and intimacy with which Lisa
seems so generous. It's
unfortunate but no surprise that the film is setting you up here, making Lisa
seductive so that we might follow along with Susanna's rather simplistic initial
decision to follow her and resist the doctors (who are so bland and clueless, as
played by Jeffrey Tambor and Redgrave, that there's no real decision to be
made). Which, in turn, means that the lesson to be learned, that this initial
decision is wrong, that the undomesticated, rule-breaking girl is emphatically
NOT the correct role model, is too easily delivered, that is, with a contrived
scene that suddenly displays her cruelty and sociopathology. How
much harder could it have been to have complicated the questions and resolutions
here? All the girl performers -- including Ryder and Jolie, who pass well enough
as teenagers -- are generally more nuanced than their dialogue or situations
would seem to allow. But no matter: the film is intent on showcasing its
stereotypes, from the gently wise doctor to the nurturing black woman to the
protagonist with a notebook. Susanna's desires to become a writer, disparaged by
her mostly unseen parents, are encouraged by her gently wise doctor and realized
at last: hence, the film/book. All
this is not to say that Girl, Interrupted doesn't offer moments that look
complex. These take place mostly when the girls take off, metaphorically, within
the hospital. Some nights, they engage in apparently ritual gatherings, stealing
away into the hospital basement to play with an abandoned bowling game, or into
one of the doctors' offices in order to go through their own files. At this
point, we see clearly the arrogance and wrongheadedness of the process of
medicalization, as the girls read out to each other the reasons for their
incarceration. Most of these have to do with upsetting the middle class status
quo, for instance, lesbianism or promiscuity. It's worth noting that for this
minute, the movie does seem to realize its most acute insight, that making girls
(or anyone else) conform to white masculine ideals is always a bad idea, in the
60s or into the year 2000. More to the point, this insight underlines that it's
also a bad idea to make movies fit into marketable formulas. It's sad. But perhaps the saddest aspect is this: by the time Susanna has survived and profited from her 18 months "inside," and is headed home (laughably, in the same cab, with the same driver, as when she left), you're not feeling that she's going on to a better or improved life, but that she's going on to be regulated and refined. Having gotten past her interruption, she's on her way to fitting in. Just the place where you don't want her to be. Contents | Features | Reviews
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