Prozac Nation

I haven’t read the memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel that is the basis for this movie. From the book reviews I looked at, they seem to have eliminated a lot of the story. She was addicted to Ritalin, and almost everything else you can ingest. Christina Ricci does a good job with the material she is given; unfortunately, that’s just alternating between being an incredible bitch and crying and saying how sorry she is. I’m not for a moment belittling the horror of clinical depression, which here is described as happening “a few steps at a time … then all at once.” I’ve felt myself going down a few of those steps, at times, sensed that there was a bottomless abyss I could easily fall into. But this movie misses just about everything. The title seems to imply that the 300,000,000 annual prescriptions for anti-depressants in America is a bad thing, but it’s the only thing that made Wurtzel even barely tolerable to others or to herself. As I understand it she went on to further adventures in self-absorption, and chronicled them all for us to read. I’d rather not. Especially after finding this comment she made about her reaction to watching the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11:

“I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, ‘this is a really strange art project…’ it was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone’s head. I just felt like everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.”

This girl is the poster child for narcissism. No wonder the film never got a theatrical release and sat on the Miramax shelf for 4 years before finally going to STARZ and DVD. Who could possibly care what happened to this asshole? If I’d known of that quote going in, I’d never have watched. Fuck you, Wurtzel! [You are too kind.]