The title is taken from the prefatory narration of a one-time mental patient diagnosed with an ill-defined Borderline Personality Disorder: "Maybe I was crazy, or maybe it was the Sixties, or maybe I was just a girl, interrupted." Kinship with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has been intimated, but apart from their nearness in period and similarity in setting, it is hard to see why. (Except of course that I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is not so well remembered.) Redefining sanity and lunacy, counterpoising freedom and conformism, leading cheers for the rebel against the tyrant, are not at issue here. A triumphant return to normality is at issue. And the closest thing to Nurse Ratched is the warm, wise, firm but forbearing (especially in the face of racial slights) Whoopi Goldberg, who seems to be under a lifetime contract to play only paragons of hipness. Dramatically stifled but histrionically wanton -- a common problem in the loony-bin genre -- the movie is uninterested in all but two of the inmates: the real-life heroine and memoirist, Susanna Kaysen, portrayed by Winona Ryder, and the closest thing to Cuckoo's McMurphy, Angelina Jolie, an eight-year bedlamite with the undimmed self-image of a diva. Ryder does all right, inserting herself into a scene at wary angles and with a ducked head, partly inhibited by the wee little girlishness of her voice. But Jolie, emoting a mile a minute, holding nothing in reserve, embellishing her dialogue with rhythmless cadenzas (if she is called upon to say the word "chicken," she will throw in a few clucks for illustrative purposes), makes you want to call for a gag and a straitjacket. Directed by James Mangold. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd