Driver: "Why are you going [to a mental institution]?"
Susanna: "Because I'm sad."
The movie is Girl, Interrupted.
I actually took notes while watching this movie. I don't mean to cause offense to other certain people but mental and personality disorders fascinate me. The brain is, after all, my favorite organ.
This movie reminded me so much like another movie dwelling on mental disorders, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". The main protagonist of that movie is R.P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, who was convicted for rape and pleaded insanity for his crime. He is then sent to a mental facility where he ends up curing the other patients of their disorders and goes against the rules and reigns of the head nurse.
Basically, for both protagonists of both movies in question, they don't actually have a distinct magnified disorder. Susanna was sent to a facility because of the helicopter parents.
Here are some of the stuff that struck me:
"You don't know what it is to be free."
So says Susanna when the other girls confront her about the things she wrote about them in her diary. Lisa is constantly on fire, thinking she's free because she refuses to be sedated by the meds they make her take. When on the contrary, she is still imprisoned behind the bars she built herself.
"Why didn't anyone press mine [buttons]? Reach in and dig the fucking truth inside."
"Because you're dead inside. You do this to make yourself feel alive."
This exchange is again between Susanna and Lisa, with the latter stating the first line. Throughout the movie, we see Lisa in her devious ways trying to push other people to their breaking point, until one of the girls commits suicide. She does drugs (not the good kind), smokes, hurts herself and others, does what she pleases and acts in other rash ways because this is how she feels freedom from "oppression".
"You think you can pass judgment on us just because you're cured?"
Susanna documented her stay in the mental facility she was in and she had quite a lot to say about her fellow patients. Susanna has begun accepting her Borderline Personality Disorder and tries to deviate herself from the other girls to be able to fully recover. Lisa steals it and tells the other girls about it and thus, the line.
"Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you and me, magnified."
This is the way it's defined in the movie, and I love it. It's given me a new understanding on what makes a person truly crazy.
Aside from these lines, I loved the performances of Angelina Jolie, who plays the wildly chaotic Lisa who befriends Susanna and turns her world topsy turvy. The characters were all so colorful, it's hard to love or hate them but you feel that you want to relate to them and you feel drawn towards these people.
After watching the movie, I felt really sad about it but at the same time, I also felt oddly enlightened.
