"White Oleander"

Richly stylized performances from Michelle Pfeiffer and Renée Zellweger fuel a delicious melodrama of woman's inhumanity to woman.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Oct 11, 2002 | If anyone tries to tell you that "White Oleander," the movie adaptation of Janet Fitch's highly successful first novel, is a moving story about growth, redemption and self-discovery, don't buy it -- no picture as entertaining as this one deserves to be saddled with those Oprahville catchphrases. "White Oleander," too over-the-top in some places and too tastefully restrained in others, may not exactly be good. But at its best it offers pleasures similar to those of 1940s women's melodramas -- pictures in which the heroine, to borrow a line from Thelma Ritter in "All About Eve," suffers everything but the hound dogs yapping at her rear end.

In "White Oleander," it's a sensible but troubled young girl named Astrid (Alison Lohman) who's suffering these trials and tribulations, which include a crazed, jealous foster mom with a gun, and a real mom who's more dangerous even without a gun. Astrid's mother, Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a charismatic but intensely controlling woman who's serving a jail sentence for killing her deceitful boyfriend. She's also an artist, of the stripe who think they're a superior species -- she doesn't come right out and say it, but in her mind, there's no reason she shouldn't get away with murder.

Before Ingrid lands in jail, though, we're given a glimpse of the tenuously harmonious relationship she and Astrid have built in their artsy but sparely tasteful Southern California home. Ingrid has force-fed Astrid plenty of strict instructions in how to be a free-thinking woman just like herself; Astrid is smart enough to catch on to the irony of Ingrid's particular brand of brainwashing, but it takes her most of the movie to really free herself from it.

So Astrid bounces from foster home to foster home, with a stint in between at a special school (where she learns to fend off bully girls with a pocketknife -- our Astrid is no wuss). Her first foster mother is a born-again former stripper named Starr (Robin Wright Penn), whose attractive boyfriend Ray (Cole Hauser) spells trouble for Astrid. Astrid's next foster mother is Claire (Renée Zellweger), a sensitive but fragile woman who adores Astrid but who also becomes too emotionally dependent on her. The third foster mom is a shifty, high-heel-wearing, wild-haired Russian émigrée named Rena (Svetlana Efremova), who uses her charges, including Astrid, as worker bees in her burgeoning used-clothing enterprise.

Through it all, Astrid gets tougher and wiser: Every time she visits her mother in prison, she gets a slightly clearer vision of Ingrid's treachery and possessiveness, and director Peter Kosminsky (working from a screenplay by Mary Agnes Donoghue) uses those visits as markers in the story's dramatic unfolding. At each visit, Astrid has changed her appearance at least slightly -- she goes from being a sunny blond California girl, just like her mom, to a raven-haired, tattooed Goth vixen.

The story is fairly simple: Growing up is always hard to do, but "White Oleander" takes off from a souped-up version of that maxim, giving us a girl who has more strikes against her than most. This is Kosminsky's first American movie feature. (His previous credits include a British television movie called "No Child of Mine," based on the true story of an abused girl who became a prostitute at age 11.) Kosminsky's style of filmmaking is polished and straightforward and a little old-fashioned: When Astrid's social worker tells her she's going to a special school, one with "lots of activities for young people," Kosminsky gives us a quick cut to a mini-riot, lifted right out of those '70s exploitation movies set in women's prisons, in which we see Astrid getting her lights punched out by a really big, really rough girl. But Kosminsky knows that conventional doesn't have to mean boring; the picture moves along swiftly, with very few slack patches.

But while the movie is attuned to some pretty difficult truths, I found myself wishing Kosminsky had hit them a little harder. In a good feminist world, a young girl's strongest allies should be other women. In "White Oleander," it's almost all women who, some knowingly and others not, are out to trip Astrid up during the roughest years of her life. That isn't lost on Kosminsky: It's clear he strove to make a movie about a young woman who refuses to be the victim of older women who, in one form or another, consider themselves victims.

Next Page: Pfeiffer plays her character as a cool-blooded reptile

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