#Summer phoenix in girl interrupted how to

#Summer phoenix in girl interrupted how to

On the one hand, it is a fascinating time capsule of the late-1960s and the role of young people therein: American society is in the grip of unprecedented social change, with many of its most established and respected institutions being questioned at their core, and no-one truly knows how to deal with young people. Girl, Interrupted also pulls off another trick, namely being a period piece which still has applications to contemporary society. It manages to pull off the same rare trick as Milos Forman's film, being simultaneously a deeply personal depiction of the nuances of mental illness and the ways in which the existing structures of American society let people down and dehumanise them. In fact, what's interesting about the film of Girl, Interrupted - directed and co-scripted by James Mangold - is that it is very interested in the structural problems present within the American system. You would expect, given their respective backgrounds, that Cuckoo's Nest would take a structural perspective on institutionalisation (as The Shawshank Redemption later did) while Girl, Interrupted would be a personal, memory-driven story, like the original novel was. Both authors also have front-line experience of the mental health industry, if such a word is not to crude while Girl, Interrupted author Susanna Keysen spent two years as a patient on a psychiatric ward, Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey spent some time working as an orderly on the graveyard shift at a facility in California. Aside from the common setting of a mental hospital, both stories play with the concept of the unreliable narrator, both set up character dynamics based on manipulation and defiance of authority, and both end on a decidedly bittersweet note.

Given its subject matter and its status as an adaptation of a popular novel, it's very tempting to simply label Girl, Interrupted as the female One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, while her work on Girl, Interrupted is not her finest performance overall - that would be A Mighty Heart - it is the jewel in the crown of this cinematic masterpiece. There are male examples of this too (like Cuba Gooding Jr., for instance), but given the many twists and turns of Angelina Jolie's career, you may well put her in the same category. Julia Roberts has never topped Erin Brockovich, Halle Berry quickly faded after Monster's Ball, and both Tatum O'Neill and Shirley Temple saw a decline in the fortunes after their respective wins. It seems to be particularly the case with female Oscar winners that their careers begin to buckle under this newfound pressure. But if someone is rewarded for giving a particular performance or doing something especially well, it creates the pressure to always be that good (or always do that one thing) from thereon in. That level of cinematic immortality (or in some cases infamy) is the level of success for which most actors and filmmakers would kill, even with the need to take the Academy's decisions both past and present with a pinch of salt. In my review of The Departed, I spoke about how winning an Oscar can often tie either a film or a person associated with it eternally to that achievement.