20141027: Drama Review--Prozac Nation

Prozac Nation

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. German/American/Canadian live action feature length film, 2001, rated R, 95 minutes, drama.
2. IMDB: 6.3/10.0 from 12,215 audience ratings. Estimated budget, 9 million USD.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 29% on the meter; 59% liked it from 21,160 audience ratings.
4. I watched this on Cinemax.
5. Directed by: Erik Skjoldbjaerg.  Written by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Wurtzel (original book) and Galt Niederhoffer (adapted screenplay).
6. Starring: Christina Ricci as Elizabeth Wurtzel, Jessica Lange as Mrs. Wurtzel, Michell Williams as Ruby, Anne Heche as Dr. Sterling, Jonathan Rhys Myers as Noah, Jason Biggs as Rafe, Nicholas Campbell as Donald Wurtzel.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Lizzie's parents split up when she was two years old.  She misses her father, who is largely absent, both physically and financially.  Lizzie's mother's relationship to Lizzie's grandmother is dysfunctional, and that runs downhill to Lizzie's relationship with her mother.


2. In 1985, Lizzie gets a journalism scholarship to Harvard.  She gets a fine award for an article she wrote about Lou Reed for the Rolling Stone.


3. Despite the scholarship, her mother has large bills to handle.  She presses hard for Lizzie to do well.  Partly because of the early success, Lizzie cannot handle everything.  She does not have the tools to deal with the availability of sex and a variety of drugs.


4. Her inner demons surface strongly in the presence of the new freedoms.  She descends into mental illness, and cannot write for a time.  Her mother sets up a connection with Dr. Sterling.  Lizzie's progress with the mental health professional is slow, and the sessions are dearly expensive.  Lizzie's mother has to move to a smaller apartment in a bad part of town; this has bad consequences later on.


5. Lizzie's interactions with young men are not all that helpful.  Noah introduces her to drugs and heavy drinking.  Rafe has better effects on her, but she cannot form a stable connection with him.


6. Just what will get Lizzie out of this pit of madness?  She has to get well to write the book that inspired the movie, after all.




3. Conclusions
1. One line summary: Writer's problems with drugs, relationships, and mental illness.
2. Five of ten.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 No particular problems.


2. Sound: 10/10 Excellent.  Lizzie wants to be a journalist covering contemporary music, and the film's score reinforces this.


3. Acting: 5/10 I liked the performances of Jessica Lange, Christina Ricci, and Michelle Williams.  The performances by the male characters were caricatures, which I rather resented.  An ugly, tough to embrace film like this one might do better not to go out of its way to alienate half their potential audience.


4. Screenplay: 4/10 Where does the title come from?  Answer: a couple of sentences in the last five minutes of the film.  The film is heavily unbalanced in favour of showing the descent into madness and the damage done.  Precious little screen time was spent on the recovered state or the process of getting there.  The film ends up being more depressing than illuminating.  The use of obscenity was bit shocking at first, but became progressively more meaningless after the first twenty or thirty iterations.