White Oleander Review
Posted by Jacob Ziegler on 10.14.2002
Some movies about women, guys can go to and appreciate, and maybe even like. This, however, is not one of them.
White Oleander
Release Date: October 11th, 2002
Some villains are so perversely evil that we simply cannot see enough of them. A villain like Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is so diabolical and evil that we cannot turn our heads away from him, we want to see what he does next. Or Hannibal Lecter, who audiences even like, despite his overpowering badness. Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in White Oleander, Ingrid Magnussen, wants to be as well drawn as those types of villains, but she falls short. In fact, she made me uncomfortable. Not the Hannibal Lecter kind of uncomfortable, but the kind of uncomfortable where I just could not stand the sight of her anymore. And that is not a good thing. Unfortunately, this character finds its way into every single area of this movie, even when she is not on screen. It is not creepy, but annoying.
The plot centers around the relationship between Ingrid and her daughter, Astrid (Alison Lohman, in a very good performance worthy of a better script). Then suddenly (which would be a motif throughout the movie, things happening suddenly), Ingrid gets a boyfriend (Billy Connolly, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him performance), he cheats on her, and she kills him. It is not one of those murders where the audience has to question whether or not she actually did it, because she did (and that is not giving anything away). So are we as an audience supposed to feel bad for Ingrid? Her explanation is that “he made love to me, and then told me to leave because he had a date.” So Ingrid is hauled off to jail, and Astrid begins her trek from foster home to foster home, trying to find her true self.
Her first stop is with Starr (played with zest by Robin Wright Penn). She has three other kids, and is a self-described “former alcoholic, crackhead, and stripper.” How this woman would be considered for foster parenthood is just one of the ridiculous aspects of the film, but it gets worse. Starr begins to think there is something going on between her man, Ray, and Astrid (whose age is never really revealed), who is young enough for this development, which is teased, to be very wrong. The resolution of this phase in the movie is so implausible I almost laughed out loud. Wright Penn’s performance is fine, it is the fault of the script that this sequence fails on many levels.
Astrid moves on to a home for wayward kids, and more implausibility finds its way into the scenes there. The only thing these scenes accomplish is to introduce Astrid’s pseudo-love interest, Patrick Trout (played by Patrick Fugit of Almost Famous), but his character is woefully underused and underdeveloped. Astrid moves on to live with Claire (Renee Zellweger, in the film’s best performance), and these scenes are the best in the movie. Astrid and Claire really bond, and Claire appears to be a normal, willing parent that is simply unable to have kids of her own. When her husband Mark, a working film director (ER’s Noah Wyle), gets home from his latest project, we begin to see disaster on the horizon. Mark is obviously having an affair, and Claire is not able to handle it. Add to that the fact that Ingrid has been writing Claire letters without Astrid’s knowledge, and Claire is primed for a mental breakdown. Her sorrow is compounded when she finally meets Ingrid, who is so manipulative that she facilitates Claire’s demise. The scenes play better than any others in the film, but they still come off as rushed.
So then it’s back to the home for kids without parents for Astrid, before her final stop, with Rena (Svetlana Efremova), a Russian who also defies logic for being considered for foster parenthood. The whole sequence of living with Rena is utterly pointless and felt tacked-on.
Throughout the movie, the character of Astrid changes to reflect her current home. It is a very convincing performance by the unknown Lohman, who receives top billing for the movie. She consistently hits all the right notes, capturing the ever-changing essence of her character. It would have been nice to see if her performance would have kept up with a better script, but she looks like she could have handled it.
As for Pfeiffer, Oscar sites all over the Internet are proclaiming her as a sure thing for a Best Supporting Actress nomination. While the performance was not bad, the handling of the character by director Peter Kosminsky was downright laughable. After she is convicted of murder (which she admits to doing), she supposedly has a “vindication,” which I will not reveal here. It shows her coming out of court all dressed in white, with backlighting giving the halo effect around her head. After spending ninety minutes convincing the audience of this woman’s outright evil, to give us that shot as the final image of her is just lazy. Give me a break.
The 411: While the film is loaded with good performances (Lohman, Zellweger, Fugit, and even Pfeiffer at times), nothing really clicked. I felt more like I was watching a TV mini-series than a legitimate film. It had its admirable parts, but director Kosminsky seemed unable to put them together to any meaningful degree. The talents of Patrick Fugit and Billy Connolly were completely wasted here. I understand it was a film about women, but there is no reason these good actors could not have had actual meaningful parts.
