Prozac Nation review

Christina Ricci has grown up. No longer the pie-eyed girl of The Addams Family or Mermaids, the talented young actress has taken some risky career decisions in the last few years. Most have paid off: witness the cult successes of Buffalo 66 and The Opposite of Sex, successes which owed much to performances by Ricci which have given a new meaning to the word feisty. Now she has taken another left-of-centre role, in this adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's zeitgeist 90s novel of clinical depression. Unfortunately, while Ricci turns in another utterly convincing performance, she delivers it in a film which is steeped in its own self-importance and which is for the most part over-indulgent and simply unpleasant.

Ricci plays the eternally depressed central character, Elizabeth. The film opens with her leaving her mother (Jessica Lange) to go off to Harvard to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Initially she is fairly happy: her work is appreciated, she gets to meet Lou Reed (Wurtzel has a major thing for 70s rockers: Reed and Springsteen in particular), and Rolling Stone magazine hires her as a freelance reviewer. Not bad for an 18-year-old. She even makes friends with her roommate, finds a boyfriend and throws a party to celebrate losing her virginity. But when depression comes knocking, it takes an inexorable hold on her and turns her into an uberbitch. She sleeps with her best friend's boyfriend, chastises her mother and grandparents, ignores her psychiatrist's attempts to help and blames everything on the fact that her father walked out on the family. For about an hour of the film she wallows in self-pity, refuses any assistance and binges on her only salvation: writing.

While clinical depression is certainly a very serious illness, it hardly makes compelling or entertaining cinema. It's extremely difficult to watch a character who is so unfortunately self-hating, with no redeeming qualities. The longer it goes on, the more difficult it is to empathise with someone who cannot operate without destroying those around her. Even prozac seems to have little beneficial effect on her melancholy.

Director Erik Skoldberg (who made the 1997 Norwegian hit Insomnia fails to exercise control over the film's narrative. Ricci is in nearly every scene and her misery soon becomes relentless. There is a lot of questionable editing, which often appears very awkward. While Ricci is undoubtedly convincing, Jessica Lange is far too over-the-top as the histrionic mother and Anne Heche too one-dimensional as the psychiatrist. The film's 'happy' ending is so shallow it almost beggars belief. Without any trace of irony or humour, this is a heavy-handed effort which will leave most viewers depressed at the fact that they paid to see it.