Eyes Wide Shut

The Slow Hanks Redemption
(The Green Mile)

Girl, Interrupt This!
by Rolando Recometa

GIRL, INTERRUPTED could've been a great women-in-prison film. Sadly, it's not even an enjoyable bad one. Anytime you have two beautiful and skilled actresses together in a film, either get under their skin so they could touch us emotionally or get inside our foreskin so we could touch ourselves shamelessly. Girl, Interrupted simply makes our skin crawl.

Susanna has "borderline personality disorder." As played by Winona Ryder, she loves to whine, smoke, give blowjobs and narrate. After a botched suicide (perhaps an attempt to end her oral fixations), she's sent away to a cuckoo's nest to learn life's lessons and discover herself. There she immediately bonds with a chicken/laxative junkie, a self-inflicted burn victim, a lesbian, a pathological liar, Whoopi Goldberg in bad-ass hair, and the foxy Angelina Jolie.

Life is beautiful in a mental hospital. They get to sleep as long as they want, watch TV a lot, hang out at an "exclusive" bowling alley, go out on ice cream trips, smoke, smoke and smoke some more. But as movies go, Susanne has to learn the dramatic way. A friend commits suicide, Martin Luther King Jr. lurks, bad movie choices are made (The Wizard of Oz), cruel words are exchanged, etc.. Susanne predictably realizes that it's time to move on and make some money as a writer. Girl, Interrupted would like us to believe that the mentally unstable make excellent writers.

Winona Ryder has acting moments we haven't seen before. There should be a clause in Angelina Jolie's contract that allows her to smoke in every movie she's in. No other lips can hold a cigarette the way hers do. Whoopi Goldberg does afro. There's nothing wrong with the performances; I just didn't care for the characters.

Girl, Interrupted is based on a true story, but it always feels like a movie. All the characters and situations ring false. And where are the lesbian shower scenes and piss/cum shots when you really need them? Instead we hear Susanne intone in a voice-over: "Maybe I was crazy. Or maybe it was the '60s. Or maybe I was just girl - interrupted." Girl, shut up!

Boy, interrupted.