Girl, Interrupted

The Thin Wall of Sanity

There is a distinct, stifling quality to the 1960s depicted in James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted. It isn’t the swinging, neon-drenched decade of rock-and-roll mythos, but rather the sterile, pastel-colored version found in the corridors of Claymoore Psychiatric Hospital. Based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, the film arrives at a fascinating intersection: it’s a story about the fragility of the female psyche, but it feels perpetually trapped between the gravity of its subject matter—mental illness, latestnetflix.com argues, the stifling expectations of women in the pre-feminist era—and the Hollywood polish of its time.

Watching it now, twenty-five years later, you can feel the push-pull of that conflict in every frame.

The film’s central conceit is the ambiguity of "borderline personality disorder" as a diagnostic bucket for teenage rebellion or, more simply, for not fitting in. Susanna, played by Winona Ryder with a kind of watchful, deer-in-headlights vulnerability, is the anchor. Ryder’s face has always possessed a particular, quiet intelligence—she doesn't need to scream to signal distress; she just needs to look slightly away from the camera.

Her Susanna is a girl drowning in the slow-motion panic of adulthood, and her entry into Claymoore feels less like a medical necessity and more like a surrender to the pressures of a society that didn’t quite know what to do with a girl who preferred reading and observing to playing the role of the obedient daughter.

Then there is Lisa. Angelina Jolie’s performance here, which earned her an Academy Award, remains a piece of lightning caught in a bottle. Jolie, then a young star on the rise, operates with a physicality that is almost feral.