Another one flew over the cuckoo's nest

by Toronto Sun

Girl, Interrupted is about surviving in an insane asylum where it's difficult to tell the inmates from the care givers. Happy holidays -- the movie opens in Toronto tomorrow.

Winona Ryder -- the star of Girl, Interrupted with Angelina Jolie -- can relate. Really relate!

The keenly intelligent, high-strung actress checked herself into a psychiatric clinic for five days after shooting the torture scenes for her 1993 drama, The House Of The Spirits.

She was 20 at the time when that movie was shot in 1992. Ryder, now just turned 28, remembers having had a rough time, especially at 19. She was working hard, sleeping little, and it culminated in severe stress on House Of The Spirits.

"I was actually in for five days," she says of her clinic stay. "I think all of you guys, in your hearts, can back me up in saying that 19 was a tough year -- for anybody, whether you're an actress or cramming for exams or your parents are driving you crazy or you're breaking up with your first love. Whatever you're going through, it's a tough year."

In her case, work caught up. "I was playing a political prisoner and I was doing torture scenes in Portugal. I came back and I was so tired -- I've always been a terrible insomniac -- and I was so exhausted and I checked myself in for sleep deprivation. Into a clinic, but it was a psychiatric ward.

"I really got nothing from it. It didn't help me at all. But the thing that I did 'get' is that those places don't really help. You don't go to a place and get a pill that fixes you. They don't give you a sheet of secret answers. You can't pay enough money to have a place fix you. Which is incredibly upsetting when you think that you can.“

"I thought: 'I have money and, if I pay them enough, they're going to have to give me some sort of cure for just feeling broken and confused and just way too sensitive for this insane world.' But it didn't work like that. I left there feeling just the same, pretty much, and just as tired.“

"They didn't really offer anything there except for group therapy, which was one hour a day. And that just didn't really do anything for me. Then all of the torture scenes (in House Of The Spirits) got cut out so it was all for nothing!"

Maybe not, but Ryder seems to have reached inside of herself to learn what she needed to survive, thrive and perform as the true-life heroine of Girl, Interrupted.

The movie, a pet project that Ryder pushed through as executive producer, is adapted (rather freely) from novelist Susanna Kaysen's autobiography, which recounts her two years in a mental hospital in 1967-69.

Like the characters in The Wizard Of Oz, who learn that the solutions to their perceived problems are inside themselves, Kaysen heals herself. (Oz scenes are shown in the new movie.)

It is a lesson that Ryder -- being unusually candid about her delicate emotional and mental state -- finds crucial. Ryder, with her gentle voice, porcelain skin and moody dark eyes, still looks like a child. But she talks like a woman.

"What she learns in the film," Ryder says, agreeing with her character, "is that there are no answers, that it's okay not to have answers for everything, that it's okay not to be perfect, that it's okay just to be a human being and be confused, that actually feeling crazy is normal, and that, if you were sitting there feeling that you actually understood the world with war and disease and famine and violence and assassinations and Vietnam, you'd be weird.“

"I'd worry about that person who understood all of those things. So feeling that way (feeling crazy) is just actually feeling like a human being."

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