Cinema: Girl, Interrupted

STARRING: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie DIRECTOR: James Mangold OPENS: Dec. 21 in N.Y.C. and L.A.; wide Jan. 14

Sometime in the ’60s, Susanna Kaysen was placed in an upscale psychiatric hospital. It appears from Girl, Interrupted, the book she wrote about the experience a couple of decades later, that she might have fared just as well as an outpatient. It appears from the movie version that we would have fared just as well if Hollywood had regarded the book as unadaptable.

It’s not that director (and final-draft writer) James Mangold has botched the job. It’s just that he made something rather conventional out of a memoir that was spare, terse and elliptically funny. And naturally, the film’s attitude toward its patients is the only acceptable one these days: that they may be saner than their keepers–especially since this is the ’60s, when the outside world is so crazy.

Call that the not-so-new sentimentality. But call Ryder’s performance as Kaysen first rate. She moves very persuasively from puzzled, rather passive resentment over her incarceration to a lively awareness of her problems to, finally, edgy mental health. Jolie is more problematic as her best friend, an overt rebel whose assertiveness leads to the movie’s most tragic–and heavily fictionalized–passage. There is something tiresome in her toughness. But that’s emblematic of the whole movie, which misses what was most engaging about Kaysen’s memoir–the unique sound of her voice, mostly drowned out here by too familiar attitudes and melodrama.

–R.S.