'White Oleander' is well-acted soap opera
By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News
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| WHITE OLEANDER (Rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, sexuality) Two and One-Half Stars (Fair-to-Good)
A soapy film version of an even soapier novel, about a young girl's decent into the hell of the California foster-care system after her mother is sent to prison for murder. Starring Alison Lohman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn, Renee Zellweger. Directed by Peter Kosminsky. Warner Bros., 115 minutes. |
As a result, it gets to the core of Fitch's story without all the filigree: a tale of the sins of the mother being visited upon the daughter.
In the process, it also offers a tough look at the foster care system, always a touchy subject though hardly a surprising one (considering the recent disappearance of a little girl within the foster system in Florida, where election ballots apparently aren't the only things that go missing).
The problem is not that the story blends elements of Dickens with contemporary soap opera. Rather, it's that so little is made of it in trying to tell this dire coming-of-age story.
Alison Lohman plays Astrid, daughter of single mom Ingrid Magnussen (Michelle Pfeiffer). Ingrid earns her living as a page make-up artist at a magazine and preaches an Amazonian sense of personal independence to Astrid, who never knew her father.
When a man dumps Ingrid after using her, she strikes back, making his life miserable with scorned-woman guerrilla tactics that escalate until Ingrid is arrested for his murder.
"I'll be back tonight," Ingrid shouts to the hysterical Astrid, who watches her mom as she is led away in handcuffs. Instead, Ingrid draws a long prison term — which sentences 14-year-old Astrid to the confinement of the foster care system.
Thus begins an odyssey that lands her in a succession of foster homes of varying levels of dysfunction. Her first foster mother is Starr (Robin Wright Penn), a Bible-thumping, former alcoholic (and former stripper). Starr is fine until she begins to suspect that Astrid has her eye on Ray (Cole Hauser), Starr's boyfriend.
Astrid's next stop is the home of a childless couple: Claire (Renee Zellweger), a movie actress whose career is on the skids, and Mark (Noah Wyle), her tabloid TV producer boyfriend. Astrid eventually winds up with a Russian emigre, a kind of female Fagin with a pack of foster teens to staff her operation salvaging items from curbside junk piles for resale at a flea market.
Through this all, Astrid ages from 14 to the psychological equivalent of 40, all during her high school years. Her only contact with her mother comes in letters and prison visits, during which her mother tries to maintain their rapidly disappearing bond.
The disintegration of their relationship comes, in part, from Ingrid's resentment that Astrid is growing up without her — not because she's missing precious moments with her child but because she misses controlling her daughter's life. Astrid is equally resentful; she blames her mother for giving in to an impulse that forces this separation and condemns Astrid to the increasingly dehumanizing foster system.
The title flower is beautiful but poisonous, much like almost every woman Astrid encounters in this film. That the three most influential — played by Pfeiffer, Penn and Zellweger — are blondes is not a coincidence. Nor is the fact that Astrid's hair goes from blonde to Gothic black in the course of the film.
Where Fitch plucked moments of brutal reality out of clouds of watery prose, screenwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue takes a blunter approach. She and Kosminsky pare away the dead foliage of the novel to get to the emotional root in the film, in the deeply felt performance by Lohman. Penn has the right feigned sweetness as the insecure Starr, while Zellweger brings a very real ache to the lonely Claire. And Pfeiffer is a past master at playing the shrewd ice princess.
The past propagates the future, but "White Oleander" focuses on one young woman's struggle to fight that destructive cycle. There is soap opera afoot here, but at least it's well acted.
Rated PG-13 for violence, profanity, sexuality.
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