Review – Girl, Interrupted

A young woman with bad attitude and irregular habits (including a suicide attempt) gets put in a mental institution back in the late 1960s. Once institutionalized, our heroine (Wynona Ryder) encounters a cast of wacky young women with various mental health problems. She finds a friend and ultimately a nemesis in a sociopath (Angelina Jolie) with a gift for anti-authority antics and other behavior of a more sinister nature. Though I’m not exactly the world’s foremost authority on the subject, I thought that overall the picture functioned fairly well as a movie aimed at female audiences. My only major quibble with the production was the conclusion, in which the moral appears to be that cooperating with forced therapy is the only road to true happiness. I also don’t really get the whole baby-boom generation thing, so the plot points that depended on an affection for 1968 fell a little short with me (hey, I was two years old at the time). Otherwise I thought this movie was an inoffensive if somewhat uninspiring bit of entertainment. The DVD also includes some out-takes that, if left in, might have made a few points a little clearer (though in the filmmakers’ defense I should note that the running time on the final cut did seem a little long even without the extra footage). Mildly amusing