(2010) There's a bridge for jumping off and another for crossing over. At 5am on Sunday, Craig (Keir Gilchrist) - a 16-year-old with suicidal thoughts from so much stress, pressure, and anxiety - enters a New York City ER, telling the admittance nurse: "I want to kill myself." She hands him a clipboard: "Fill this out."

Panicky when Dr Mahmoud wants to send him home to his parents, Craig pleads to be admitted to the mental ward of the hospital. It's not that Craig's parents, George and Lynn, and his younger sister Alissa aren't caring: Don't blame them, he tells us.

He's been obsessed for two years with Nia (Zoë Kravitz), the girlfriend of his best friend Aaron (Thomas Mann) who's good at everything and thus with whom Craig feels he can't compete for Nia's attention; he's been procrastinating filling out an application to the Franklin Gates Summer Session program (for which he believes if he doesn't get accepted will disappoint his father and spoil his chances of getting into a good college, ending his dreams of becoming a CEO and president of the USA and of having a great lifestyle with a terrific girlfriend); and he stress vomits at inopportune times.

Having convinced Dr Mahmoud, Craig's directed to 3 North, the floor for adult psychiatrics where he's greeted by Smitty (who points out the importance of earning points) and given a tour by Bobby (Zach Galifianakis), whom Craig had met earlier impersonating a physician. His roommate Muqtada, a bearded Egyptian, lies in bed rarely speaking.

Observing how messed up these patients are with schizophrenia and other mental disturbances, Craig begs Dr Eden Minerva (Viola Davis) to let him leave since he's already feeling much better. Nothing doing: at minimum he must remain for five days of observation. Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden together wrote the screenplay for this quirky romcom based on Ned Vizzini's novel, giving Bobby the line from Bob Dylan: "He not busy being born is busy dying."

While worrying about missing school at the very exclusive (reserved for the 800 most intelligent high-school students in the city, by which he's certain he got in by clerical error) Executive Pre-Professional, where Aaron and Nia also attend, as well as that his classmates and teachers might find out he's been committed to a mental ward, he notices Noelle (Emma Roberts), another teenager on the floor, dropping a note on the floor beside him. Later on Monday evening they engage in a conversation of questions.

On Tuesday Craig overhears Bobby's wife with their eight-year-old daughter screaming at him that things would be better if he were dead. Earlier Craig had helped Bobby practice for his interview to get into a group home, after which Bobby flies into a rage thinking he'd blown it, making a strong impression on Craig, who tells Dr Minerva he wishes he could release all of the pressure building inside him over grades, girls, parents, wars, the economy, etc. She answers with the Serenity Prayer: "Lord, grant me the serenity/ To accept the things I cannot change;/ Courage to change the things I can;/ And wisdom to know the difference."

Initially hesitant to participate, "Cool Craig" (as Bobby has nicknamed him) demonstrates his talents as an artist with his intricate mind-map drawings and vocals during a musical exercise. Sneaking off to the gym to shoot some hoops, Bobby guides Craig in how to ask Noelle out. When Nia shows up, saying she and Aaron had broken up, a fiasco results when Noelle hears in the hallway Craig telling Nia he loves her.

By Friday as a wiser teenager, having realized his self-indulgence, Craig better understands that everyone experiences periods of emotional unease (especially adolescents), if not mental disease, and returns home. The filmmakers, as often happens in fictional representations of patients in asylums, have overly romanticized the inhabitants and unrealistically downplayed their disabilities and inadequacies.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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