Girl, Interrupted (1999) was something of a favorite film among my peers in high school. It caught the zeitgeist for a generation of young women just coming-of-age. As a film it captured the angst and uncertainty of high school while also reassuring its audience that those feelings were natural and a part of life. Girl, Interrupted, after twenty-five years, may have lost some of its dramatic potency but it remains a picture elevated by the ensemble performances of the actors involved.
What hasn’t aged well is the film’s lack of compassion for the inmates at Claymoore hospital. The film never takes the time to develop secondary characters beyond what ever neurosis they’ve been diagnosed with. Talented performers such as Clea DuVall, Brittany Murphy, and Elisabeth Moss are left playing caricatures opposite the more fully developed Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. It’s problematic but it is also a part of the film’s program which is more interested in the relationship between Ryder and Jolie. If the film were less focused on the supporting players their relegation to caricature would be less pronounced and far less troublesome.
For filmmaker James Mangold the focus of the film is that central relationship that challenges Ryder’s character’s sense of self in a social and political milieu of late sixties suburbia. The film quickly establishes the oppressive nature of suburban ennui pre-Women’s Liberation before thrusting Ryder into conflict with the erratic and free-wheeling Jolie. The relationship emboldens Ryder’s character to assert herself and embrace her point of view. Gradually Ryder out grows her need for Jolie and is then released from Claymoore “cured”.
As a product of the late nineties Girl, Interrupted shies away from any Queer representation. The homoerotic element of the relationship between Ryder and Jolie exists only sub-textually. The film reaffirms again and again that Ryder is heterosexual with her dalliances with different boys. The Queer subtext of Girl, Interrupted only comes through in the actors’ performances and clearly does not exist in the script or Mangold’s direction.
By today’s standards Girl, Interrupted feels tame and conservative. The impact the film had when it was released is unimaginable now. Girl, Interrupted has become more of a period piece set in the late nineties than a look back to the sixties. The film says more about gay panic, the taboo of eating disorders and the stigma of mental illness in the nineties than it does anything else.
