Girl, Interrupted

Book: Girl, Interrupted was written by Susanna Kaysen. It's an autobiographical novel about Kaysen's year in a mental institution in the 1960's. Published in 1993.

Movie: The screenplay was written by James Mangold and Lisa Loomer, and the director was James Mangold. It was going to be Winona Ryder's comeback to stardom, but became Angelina Jolie's triumph instead, and Jolie ended up winning an Oscar for her supporting role as Lisa. The movie came out in 1999.

Plot Differences: The book has no linear plot; it's a collection of memories and musings about sanity, society and interesting personalities, a very modern and fragmentary novel. The movie pretty much changed it into a clear-cut linear narrative intersected with flashbacks of Susanna's life. Events that never really happened have been added to the movie; these include Susanna and Lisa running away and Lisa stealing Susanna's diary and threatening to kill her.

Character differences: The character of Lisa is expanded in the movie; she only appears in one or two chapters in the book. In the movie, Lisa pretty much steals the show from the protagonist Susanna, whose symptoms of insanity are played down and she seems like a downright dull character in a crazy setting. Susanna's roommate Georgina is made less central than in the book. The story of Daisy, who is abused by her father, is expanded considerably and tied to Susanna's story. The black nurse, portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg, does not appear in the novel in a similar form (there is a nurse named Valerie, but she is not at all like Goldberg's character).

Author opinion: Kaysen has said she hates the movie, calling it "melodramatic drivel". Full article here.

My opinion:
Girl, Interrupted is a movie I've seen many times and used to love - until I read the book. Which is brilliant. Kaysen really has an original voice as an author, and her insights were interesting to read. Unfortunately, almost none of them were used in the movie, and the writers decided to just change the entire story. It seems like the target audiences for the book and movie are completely different. This is a definite case of dumbing down a novel to please a wider, less educated audience, an audience more used to linear narratives and flashbacks and probably uninterested in the book.

The film flows fairly nicely. Winona Ryder is good, but the character of Susanna has been blanded down a bit too much and fails to make the impression she makes in the book. More VO's might have helped. Angelina Jolie as Lisa is really good, of course - and completely unrecognizable as a junkie with rings around her eyes and ruffled hair. The outfits, furniture and town landscape fit well to the 1960's, and the Vietnam war news run alongside the events in the institution. Some of the humor works and some of the dialogue is poignant enough to keep up my interest.

The movie is a bit different from the mainstream. It does portray people in a mental institution, which you don't see too often. However, their insanity has been sort of toned down to not offend people. One woman does shout out dirty words compulsively in one scene, but we don't see Alice Calais painting herself with her own feces like in the book, or something else that might upset more sensitive viewers. The problem with the movie is that it makes the institution seem like a nice little summer camp for pretty young girls whose appearance and behavior don't offend the viewer. Some characters don't really display their problems at all. For example, Georgina's "I'm a compulsive liar" is never backed up with anything. She doesn't tell one lie during the film.

The DVD has lots of deleted scenes. The fact that a lot of these scenes are Susanna seeing things or experiencing "insane" moments speaks about the weirdly political thread running through this film: that Susanna's hospitalization had a lot more to do with her society and its norms than with her being sick. Which in itself is fine and to some extent present in the book. The problem is that the film makers clearly didn't want to portray Susanna as insane or in need of help at all. The clearest sign of this is the scene where the head nurse, played by Whoopi Goldberg, tells Susanna that she's just a lazy, spoiled rich girl who doesn't know what real insanity even is. It's an abominable scene. Firstly, the book has no "lesson" Susanna must learn, and it's condescending to state the message of the film like this. Secondly, it would be horribly unprofessional of a nurse to tell a patient something like this - a judgement, really; something she can't possibly say with any authority, because she doesn't talk to the patients about their problems. She simply wouldn't know, and even if she made that judgement in her mind, it wouldn't be OK for her to say it out loud. And we're supposed to side with her?

The scenes added by the screenwriters can be clearly distinguished from the ones based on real events. Susanna and Lisa never ran away. Susanna wasn't there when Daisy committed suicide. The ward didn't go to an ice cream parlor where Susanna's ex-lover's wife was told off by Lisa. The patients didn't spend nights going down a secret pathway and bowling while 60's music played. In fact, very few of the scenes and dialogues that took place in the book actually made it to the movie.

Most notably of all, the scene where Lisa steals Susanna's diary seems unreal and strange. I thought at first it was a dream sequence, but no. Susanna finds the other patients reading her diary in the basement, and Lisa chases her and threatens to kill her. Susanna tells her she's already dead, and Lisa has a nervous breakdown. This kind of thing brings the movie down. People telling each other they're already dead, with dramatic music in the background, gives the feel that we're watching a performance, not an interaction between real people. Too much of the dialogue in the movie is clearly aimed directly at the viewer: "Dear viewer, please note that Daisy is abused by her father, and the only reason she was released was because her Daddy was rich and powerful." "Dear viewer, are you catching the irony we're playing on here: Lisa threatens to kill Susanna, while she herself is already dead inside?" Dear writers? We get it. Less would have been better.

The use of music is another thing that bugged. When they sing Downtown to Polly who's in seclusion, it just becomes another unbelievable cinema moment where they sing a famous song of the era. Again, less would have been more.

The movie isn't bad, exactly. It's just that it's too far removed from the book to really be an adaptation of it. It's more a movie loosely based on the characters in the book. As an adaptation of the book, it's a failure. As a movie, it's kept my interest on repeated viewings and is at times compelling. The movie clichés drag it down, but don't completely ruin it. If they had used the deleted scenes, which are mostly based on the book, it would have been much better.

You know who should have made this movie? Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry. Imagine how they could have done justice to the non-linear timeline and the visual imagery in the novel.