AlloCiné recommends the nuggets from the Netflix catalog. Catch Angelina Jolie in her Oscar-winning film for Best Supporting Actor: A Stolen Life, a moving drama available on the platform.
Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie found themselves in a psychiatric hospital while filming the film A Stolen Life, adapted from the memoir of Susanna Kaysen, the true story of a young woman who is placed in an institution by an aspirin overdose. specialist for personality disorder.
Susanna (Ryder) then finds herself in a strange universe populated by young girls as attractive as they are disturbed, such as Lisa (Jolie), a charming sociopath who develops a disastrous escape attempt with her.
The film is a passion project for Winona Ryder, who searched for more than five years to edit the film, without finding a version of the screenplay that satisfied her. The trigger came after seeing Heavy (1995), the first feature film by filmmaker James Mangold: she wanted him to write the film. Ryder agrees to shoot Lost Souls so that A Stolen Life can be his next film.
It will, as Mangold reaches an agreement with actress and producer Douglas Wick on a definitive script. Filming took place from late January to mid-April 1999 and was released at the end of the year in the United States. The film then received mixed reviews, and Angelina Jolie won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Columbia Pictures Angelina Jolie, 24, as Lisa
It must be said that she literally bursts the screen in the role of Lisa, an impetuous rebel, aggressive towards authority, a resident of the psychiatric establishment for eight years and a terrible influence for Susanna.
If fans of the book have been able to criticize, as Susanna Kaysen herself notably did, that the film adds melodrama where there was none, it is with pleasure to see this casting again in top form, including a plethora of well-known supporting roles like Elisabeth Moss (The Scarlet Handmaiden), Clea DuVall, Jared Leto (Requiem for a Dream), Jeffrey Tambor (Transparent), Vanessa Redgrave, Whoopi Goldberg and Brittany Murphy, just that!
Columbia Pictures
Winona Ryder
A Stolen Life is one of James Mangold’s somewhat forgotten features, and yet it’s beautifully staged, placing hospital scenes under a blanket of white and only allowing itself most bright colors on the exterior. And if the comparison with the unbeatable Flight over the Cuckoo’s Nest is inevitable, the film manages to find its own tone and originality, carried by the interpretation of the duo Ryder-Jolie.
Something rare enough to be underlined, there is sometimes a lightness of your welcome, which makes us smile with the patients and not at their expense.