REVIEWS OF EVERY MOVIE in MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION
PART ONE
The narrator of my novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation watches a lot of movies1. Reva, her best friend, doesn’t understand her taste…
“What do you like so much about Whoopi Goldberg?” [Reva asked me.] “She’s not even funny. You need to be watching movies that are going to cheer you up. Like ‘Austin Powers.’ Or that one with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. You’re like Winona Ryder from ‘Girl, Interrupted’ all of a sudden. But you look more like Angelina Jolie. She’s blond in that.”
This was how she expressed her concern for my well-being.
“Girl Interrupted” (1999)
The movie that nailed how fucked up young white women can be cool, hot and scary, based on Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir about going to McLean’s after a suicide attempt in 1967. I still think this is Angelina Jolie’s finest performance.
“Girl, Interrupted” single-handedly guided us into the millennium of pop culture with a more nuanced, more expansive and intelligent vision of femininity by assembling a cast of characters who are each uniquely suffering. It’s not a radical, punk movie, and that’s why it was so powerful.; it didn’t scare people away. So people watched it. Even though it’s full of “unlikable female characters.”
It’s a sad movie because not everybody survives their madness and trauma, but Winona Ryder’s character (Susanna Kaysen) is inspiring. In the end, she chooses to enagage in her life and be curious about what she has to learn; and the book and movie are proof that she made the right decision. (Yes, I do think survival really depends on recognizing when you are about to lose your ability to choose what you want for yourself.)
Incredible performances by Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, Brittany Murphy (RIP), Elizabeth Moss, Clea DuVall, Jared Leto, and—miraculously—Whoopi Goldberg. And of course Janet Webber, whose tearful, insistent appeal, “Seventy-four pounds is the perfect weight!” has stayed with me for the past twenty-five years. (I have never weighed seventy-four pounds—maybe for a minute in third grade.)
I met Susanna Kaysen very briefly in 2013 when I attended The Paris Review spring gala to receive the Plimpton Prize for some short stories I’d published in the Review that year. Kaysen was there with