Classic Movie Review : Prozac Nation (2001)

A long, long time ago before the manic pixie dream girl was even a thing, people were afraid of women. Also, the conversation around mental health was nowhere where it is today, so women in crisis were either shunned or objects of fascination. Sometimes both, like Elizabeth Wurtzel who underwent a depression on her first year of college in the eighties and received only adversity and aggravation as her life spun out of control. She wrote a memoir about her ordeal: Prozac Nation.

The 2001 film adaptation is considered somewhat of an indie cinema classic, but I’d never seen it until last weekend.

Prozac Nation tells the story of Elizabeth Wurtzel (Christina Ricci)’s first year in journalism at Harvard, where she is immediately noticed for her talent for atypical, groundbreaking storytelling is immediately noticed and celebrated. She immediately feels a lot of pressure to keep delivering and her mental health starts tailspinning. As we mostly know by now, someone undergoing a crisis might be a little hostile to help, but no one knew this then and it got ugly for young Lizzie.

Sex, Drugs and Outside Judgement

The most heartbreaking thing about Prozac Nation is that Elizabeth Wurtzel knows exactly what’s happening to her and no one else cares. She’s been raised to be a perfect little girl by an unhappy, strung out mother (played by a god-tiered Jessica Lange) and once that she achieve that status, the only logical thing to do was to explode. So she did and no one helped. She was brought to the hospital and hooked up with a psychiatrist sure, but she’s also perceived as dangerous and crazy.

It’s so anxiety inducing to witness young Elizabeth gradually capsize into her nightmare self and having everyone around her asking why is she such a bitch instead of setting proper boundaries and having the difficult conversations with her. It’s one thing for her mother who has her entire personality enmeshed with her daughter, but her friends and her boyfriend Rafe (Jason Biggs, back when he still existed) turning their on her because she doesn’t conform to what they want out of her.

I can’t say the movie even empathizes with Wurtzel as she’s played by an hypersexual Christina Ricci who’s in seduction mode at every frame, except when she’s around her mother. We came a long way in forty something years in regards to mental health and if anything, Prozac Nation is a stark reminder of that. It’s a haunted movie about how every problem that came up over the last twenty odd years already existed, but we collectively chose to ignore them and no, we weren't better for it.

Portraying the Self (Adrift)

Prozac Nation is a profoundly depressing movie, perhaps even unintentionally so as it aged into a shameful representation of how we used to treat people suffering from mental health issues thirty or forty years ago, but it’s also a good movie. Christina Ricci is sometimes not attuned to her character, but her portrait of a person torn between expectations and self-definition is believable and heartbreaking. It's something many people growing up between let’s say 78 and 98 can relate to.

On top of being a movie about mental health, Prozac Nation works as a time capsule of an era where young people were not permitted to feel bad. That not having adult responsibilities was considered to be the equivalent of getting oral sex 24/7 while being fed grapes and hydromel. It is best embodied in scenes where she argues about therapists bills her mother and father respectively and where her lack of financial autonomy force her to contemplate how bad their wrecked her life.

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I don’t think anything like Prozac Nation could be made today. At least not without being trashed and called emotionally cruel and uselessly chaotic. That’s what it was called back then it came out anyway because film critics were obviously not ready to deal with such a level of look-in-the-abyss cinema coming right on the heels of Requiem for a Dream, which was considerably more unhinged than that. But it holds its own. I don’t want to see it ever again, but it has earned the right not to be forgotten.

It’s not a fun movie, but it’s real. RIP Elizabeth Wurtzel.

7.5/10

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