Girl, Interrupted is the story of a weak-willed, lazy, self-indulgent brat of a girl named Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder). After a pretty unimaginative cry-for-help/attempted-suicide (chasing a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka), Susanna signs herself into a rather posh asylum called Claymoore. As she initials the paperwork, she denies that she ever attempted to commit suicide. Later, she will insist that her parents are the ones who committed her to the institution. She never once in the film takes responsibility for anything she does, and she is of course released from the mental institution once she demonstrates to her psychiatrist (expertly played by Vanessa Redgrave) that she understands the difference between the insane way of blaming everyone else in the world for our problems and the sane way of doing the very same thing.
It's very difficult to make a crazy person dull, but I never quite figured out whether Susanna comes across as boring because she's not really crazy or because Ryder wanted to prove that she could force an audience to be consumed by rage at a character who is hardly worthy of their attention. In her interview with Dr. Crumble (Kurtwood Smith), Susanna claims that the bones in her hands vanished temporarily. Now that is an interesting claim, the kind of claim that I like to see a crazy person run with. Daniel Paul Schreber (Freud's case study in paranoia) made a similar claim concerning his own internal organs, which were always being stirred around, removed, and replaced by the hand of God (according to Schreber). When Schreber's psychiatrist asked him how he managed to eat without a stomach, Schreber replied, "Sometimes a stomach was produced in me, ad hoc as it were, by miracles." By contrast, when Dr. Crumble asks Susanna how she managed to take the aspirin and drink the vodka with no bones in her hands, she merely changes the subject of conversation.
That's what she does whenever she's faced with a question that seems to her to be too difficult to answer: She changes the subject. I like my crazy people brazen and tirelessly imaginative. I like to see a crazy mind at work. But Susanna doesn't even take her insanity seriously enough to give it the kind of hyperbolic defense that it deserves. That's why we need the foil, a sociopath named Lisa Rowe (Angelina Jolie).
Lisa is, in the beginning at least, an interesting crazy person, the kind of crazy person that makes you feel ashamed for not being a little more crazy yourself. She rejects rules that others accept uncritically; she mocks authority until authority figures attempt to punish her (at which point she uses her wits to escape). She is (or at least she initially appears to be) fearless, strong, attractive, and motivated by the very special kind of courage that it takes to spurn the values of a society that has never taken the time to evaluate itself critically.
Her courage, however, is undercut by the fact that she is confined to a mental institution that seems, as Grouch says, "more like a summer camp with Valium than an asylum." The film never shows her receiving shock treatments (though we hear about them), but it does give us a good long look at her petty rebellions. She uses profanity (gasp!) and sneaks into Claymoore's basement bowling alley (oh my!) and breaks into the asylum's main office so that she and her friends can read the files that their psychologists have been compiling on them (outrageous!).
Perhaps her most important moment comes after she and Susanna have escaped the asylum to spend the night with a former inmate named Daisy (Brittany Murphy) who has been released into the world. Lisa wants to follow through on the escape, but the cowardly Susanna seems to want to be caught. Neither of them can honestly be surprised by Daisy's suicide, but Susanna uses her friend's death as an excuse to fall apart. "Don't be stupid," Lisa barks at her, pointing out that they've already called the ambulance and that there's nothing left to do but take Daisy's money and run. She doesn't bother to articulate the obvious: that Daisy has been suicidal for years, that the money on the corpse will only end up being returned to the father whose sexual abuse of his daughter led to the suicide, that no amount of wailing and sniffling will bring Daisy back, and, most importantly, that fugitives from an asylum should always remember to be in a hurry. Susanna already knows all of that, but instead of getting her stuff together, she falls into a heap and blubbers idiotically. "All right," Lisa responds, "fine, be stupid."
But what is arguably Lisa's best moment is also really her last, for when she is eventually caught and returned to the asylum, she is a different being--or perhaps the same being in a different movie. Once Susanna is freed of Lisa's influence, she changes from being a weak-willed, lazy, self-indulgent brat of a crazy girl to being a weak-willed, lazy, self-indulgent brat of a recovering girl. She allows her psychologist to teach her how to manifest her insanity through such socially acceptable outlets as contempt for the deformed and a joyous devotion to the pageantry of human stupidity. When Lisa returns, Susanna has become the sort of socially brainwashed person who can say, "Maybe the whole world is stupid and ignorant, but I'd rather be in it than down here with you." As Mangiotto says, "[T]here are far more graceful ways to tell me what you're thinking than screaming it at me in sound bites taken from my tenth-grade diary."
Particularly since the first two-thirds of the film prevent us from seeing Susanna as a sympathetic character, it is especially painful in the last third to have Lisa taken away from us as well. One moment, Susanna is racing through a subterranean labyrinth (as in a gothic novel) from her syringe-wielding, sociopathic friend. The next, she has reduced Lisa to a heap of despair simply by saying, "You're already dead!" I don't believe the scene for a second, but what I particularly don't believe is the way that Lisa pretends to believe in the scene.
Director James Mangold's decision to depict Susanna as an unsympathetic protagonist is obviously bold, but his decision to turn Lisa into a snivelling mass of undirected anger suggests that Girl, Interrupted is ultimately a movie designed to enable those of us who have never been instititutionalized to pat ourselves on the back for our sanity. Insanity, the film seems to suggest, is no more courageous an approach to life than following the herd of humanity through the progress of life as ordained by the dead people who made up the rules ages and ages ago. One has to be impressed by a film that presents itself as a feel-good movie for the sane by implicitly claiming that we're destined for misery whether we work as cab drivers or indulge ourselves in insanity. "Don't worry," Mangold seems to say, "you sane people aren't really missing anything. The insane are just as unhappy as the rest of us."
So what are we to make of the reconciliation between Susanna and Lisa, between the girl who didn't have the guts to stick with her own insanity and the other girl whose insanity appears to have been stolen from her (either by her friend or her own weakness or a directorial decision)? In the final scene between the two girls, Susanna very significantly paints the fingernails of her sociopathic friend. Susanna is about to leave Claymoore and to explain that most of the women she met in the asylum were ultimately released. They learned how to get along in the world, how to keep up the appearance of sanity. What does it mean for her to precede this little denouement speech of hers by doing something as superficial and cosmetic as painting the nails of a sociopath who is tied to her bed?
I think it means that Mangold (who cowrote the film in addition to directing it) is aware of the many ways in which he disappoints us with his conclusion, but that he saw no other way to conclude the tale.
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