Girl, Interrupted

28 January 2019

Girl, Interrupted 1999

• Director: James Mangold
• Based on the autobiography by Susanna Kaysen
• Cast: Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Clea Duvall, Brittany Murphy, Elizabeth Moss, Jared Leto, Jeffrey Tambor, Vanessa Redgrave, Whoopi Goldberg
• Personal “oh yeah him/her” reaction, i.e. have seen this actor in:
• Winona Ryder – The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, A Scanner Darkly, The Darwin Awards, Alien Resurrection, The Crucible, Little Women, Reality Bites, The House of the Spirits, Dracula, Night on Earth, Edward Scissorhands, Great Balls of Fire, Beetlejuice
• Angelina Jolie – The Tourist, Wanted, Changeling, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
• Clea Duvall – Zodiac, 21 Grams, The Astronaut’s Wife, A Slipping Down Life, She’s All That, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Brittany Murphy – 8 Mile, Riding in Cars with Boys
• Elizabeth Moss – Top of the Lake, Mad Men, Anywhere but Here, A Thousand Acres
• Jared Leto – Blade Runner 2049, Requiem for a Dream, American Psycho, Fight Club, The Thin Red Line
• Jeffrey Tambor – The Invention of Lying, Pollack, Meet Joe Black, Hill Street Blues
• Vanessa Redgrave – The Butler, A Song for Marion, Coriolanus, Atonement, The Pledge, Cradle Will Rock, Lulu on the Bridge, Mrs Dalloway, Wilde, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, The House of the Spirits, Howards End, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, Prick Up Your Ears, Playing for Time, The Devils, Oh What a Lovely War, Isadora, Camelot, Blow-Up
• Whoopi Goldberg – Pauly Shore Is Dead, Absolutely Fabulous, Moonlight and Valentino, Corrina Corrina, Sister Act 1&2, Ghost, The Colour Purple
• Why? Good movie, good cast.
• Seen: Once before, now 27 January 2019      

       Eighteen-year-old Susanna (Ryder) is committed to a mental hospital for what she believes will be a short time of rest. Her dismay at finding herself confined with a lot of very disturbed people is interspersed with memories of how she herself got there.

       She forms friendships with some of the other patients in a bizarre sorority of the seriously damaged. The parallels of their madness and that of the society that put them there are painfully clear. It’s the 60’s. Young men are being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Martin Luther King is assassinated. Everybody smokes. Everywhere. All the time.

       Ryder is amazing. Jolie is so young. And amazing. They all are. Many in this mostly young cast went from here to making acting careers.

       Small wonder that this film impressed us so much the first time.

4 * of 5