Pop Quiz: A young woman who has recently made a half-hearted suicide attempt is being questioned by a psychiatrist friend of the family. Unctuous Kurtwood Smith is the psychiatrist. Surly but wide-eyed Winona Ryder (you can tell she's intense because she lets her cigarette ash get really long before she flicks it) is the young woman. Who are you supposed to root for?

Yup, Girl, Interrupted tips its sensitive—but strong!—little hand early on. Ryder, an executive producer on the movie, which is based on a memoir by Susanna Kaysen, gutsily enlisted promising indie director James Mangold to oversee it. Ryder plays Susanna, a directionless child of privilege who, after the aforementioned suicide "attempt," lands herself in a mental institution in the late '60s. The movie doesn't really hew all that faithfully to the memoir (the affected dry tone of which sticks in one's craw after five pages), and instead pumps up certain incidents for drama, providing plenty of contrived moments wherein Ryder can strut her sensitive—but strong!—stuff, and lots of opportunities for Angelina Jolie—as Lisa, the coolest and the baddest of the mental institution's guests—to be very cool and very bad, which she does most compellingly.

The screenplay by director Mangold (Heavy, Cop Land) intersperses Susanna's institution adventures with flashbacks of her life prior to her confinement, where we see that Susanna is pretty indulgent, careless, slothful, and overinfatuated with her own ur-goth philosophy. She isn't so much crazy as she is a colossal drip. Still, the movie wants the audience to side with her; when shrink Smith chides Susanna for all the pain she's caused the people around her, we're supposed to scream out: "You fool! Can't you see the person she's hurting the most is herself?" Susanna and Lisa's subsequent escapades are, for the most part, depicted as empowering and liberating revolts against a world that just doesn't understand. And then, about two-thirds of the way through, the movie bizarrely shifts gears, abandoning its half-baked Better-Living-Through-Solipsism curriculum for a Maybe-These-Mental-Health-Professionals-Are-On-To-Something tack. Mangold's other films have demonstrated a real empathy for outsiders; here that empathy gets him into trouble, because it eventually points out the intellectual muddle the picture has sunk into.

—Glenn Kenny

This review was originally published in the February 2000 issue of PREMIERE magazine.