This movie carries the taste of an inadequately adapted book based on a more or less true story. The lead character, Susanna (Winona Ryder), lives in her head and is sent to the mental hospital because she can’t relate to her world or make up her mind about her life. The impetus for her commitment is that she chased a bottle of aspirin with a bottle of vodka. In the hospital, she meets a range of "really" crazy girls including Lisa (Angelina Jolie) who is the lead trouble maker. Jolie has received the well-deserved Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as an incisively insightful vixen who can seduce and push buttons to command the response she chooses from others.

Susanna rebels against the conforming establishment by following Lisa’s example, but she finds herself more defeated as that example eventually leads from fun to the destruction of others. Susanna’s chances of leaving Claymoore are exponentially diminished until she becomes independent from others for her sense of meaning and direction.

Although the first half of the movie espouses the importance of reaching beyond the categorization of normal or abnormal, the essence of the message is muddled because Susanna processes her world through writing and visions, which for the most part remain beyond our comprehension.  The idea is to resist conformity and surrender to an external mold, which everyone around Susanna seems to be suffering from including the so called "normal" people like her mother and her school teacher, and the school teacher’s daughter who is forced to give up the opportunities within her reach in order to follow her mother's footsteps. Susanna's inner turmoil is reflected beautifully through Winona Ryder's acting, but the internal conflicts cannot create the dramatic tension needed for this film to make a significant impact.

The second half of the movie manages to develop a powerful message about self-expression. Susanna realizes that her rebellion was the result of her inability to acknowledge what she feels and to understand what she wants. Under the pretext of rebelling against social conformity, she has locked herself away from true explorations of who she is. Only when she decides to open up to the world does she really learn to be a part of the world and earn her right to leave Claymoore.

As a final test, Susanna must confront Lisa, the one she’s never been able to stand up to because Lisa always seems to know the real issues with people. In a touching scene, Susanna makes Lisa face the reality that she can be murderously destructive to others and herself, and that this has kept her a prisoner at Claymoore longer than everyone else. This climax alone makes this film worth seeing.

Finding and fighting against issues that imprison us is one of the essential challenges of growth. The realities and circumstances come and go, but the responsibility to live with integrity to ourselves remains. Baggage, as we colloquially call the unresolved internal issues, comes in all shapes and sizes. Sifting through baggage is inevitably painful, much more so than not being able to face the world because we can’t face ourselves.

Girl, Interrupted asks us to consider the baggage we carry, and that might just be the first step towards a better life.

The explorations developed by the film indicate that the book Girl, Interrupted would make a good reading. Let us know if you have read the book and what you thought of it.