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What did you think of "Girl, Interrupted"?   Good 76% 350   Bad 9% 40   Somewhere in between 2% 10   Haven't seen it 13% 58 Total Votes   458

Verdict: Two fine actresses, two fine performances.

Details: Starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Directed by James Mangold. Rated R for strong language and content relating to drugs, sexuality and suicide. 2 hours, 5 minutes.

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Review: Angelina Jolie interrupts "Girl, Interrupted" like a great rude shout.

As Lisa, a charismatic sociopath who befriends the film's heroine, she's a mad, bad girl, so simultaneously fierce and flippant that she can make ordering a hot fudge sundae an act of aggression.

Jolie provides the fireworks, but producer-star Winona Ryder gives the film its steadying, heartfelt center. The actress snapped up the rights to Susanna Kaysen's 1993 memoir of her two-year stint in an upscale psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s. But it took her almost six years to find a suitable director. She hit pay dirt with James Mangold ("Heavy," "Copland"), who eschews the genre's potential touchy-feely pitfalls and opts for a rip-roaring tone more akin to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." (Jolie is already being called "a female Jack Nicholson.")

Not that you don't see teddy bears and girls in fluffy slippers, but there's something unexpectedly unsettling about "Girl, Interrupted." It puts you on edge.

Ambushed by her parents and a "family friend" therapist who talks to her for about 20 minutes, 18-year-old Susanna (Ryder) signs herself into Claymoore, only to find that most of the patients aren't quiet little sensitive-depressives like her. Aside from the flamboyant Lisa, there's Polly (Elisabeth Moss), who's burned off half her face; Daisy (Brittany Murphy), who's addicted to laxatives, chicken and Daddy; and Georgina (Clea Duvall), a compulsive liar with a "Wizard of Oz" fixation. Compared with them, Susanna seems positively sane — except that she chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka because "I had a headache."

"Girl, Interrupted" leans a little too heavily on the '60s dictum that only the crazy are sane. And a last-act confrontation is as superfluous as it is over the top. But overall, the movie is a wonderful surprise, especially for those expecting a kind of women-as-victims update of "The Snake Pit."

These kids definitely aren't all right, and the movie is careful to show them as individuals, not just as cultural detritus that doesn't fit in. Mangold reinforces this aspect with a strong cast of authority figures: Vanessa Redgrave, once an icon of madness ("The Many Loves of Isadora"), as the imposing yet sympathetic head therapist; Jeffrey Tambor as a superficially foolish yet genuinely caring doctor; and Whoopi Goldberg, who may look like a cross between Angela Davis and Buddha in her '60s Afro and serape but who understands Susanna better than anyone else, telling her, "You're a lazy, self-indulgent little girl who's driving herself crazy."

Jolie's role is a built-in showcase, but to her credit, she does many daring and unexpected things with it. Ryder is in charge of her camera-ready fragility and vulnerability, using it in a shrewdly nuanced portrayal that's the best work she's ever done.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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