In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder - an affliction with symptoms so ambiguous almost any adolescent girl might qualify - and sent to a renowned New England psychiatric hospital where she spent the next two years in a ward for teenage girls.
There, Susanna loses herself in an OZ-like nether world of seductive and disturbed young women: among them Lisa (Angelina Jolie), a charming sociopath who stages a disastrous escape with Susanna, Daisy (Brittany Murphy), a pampered girl with a predilection for rotisserie chicken, and Polly, a remarkably kind burn victim.
Ultimately, assisted by the hospital's head psychiatrist, Dr. Wick (Vanessa Redgrave), and a no-nonsense ward nurse, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg), Susanna, like Dorothy, resolves to leave this Oz and reclaim her life.
Girl Interrupted, from the searing bestseller, questions the boundaries between confinement and freedom, friendship and betrayal, and madness and sanity at a time when it seemed the whole world might be going crazy.
|
Girl, Interrupted
|