When a mom goes to prison, her daughter goes from foster home to foster home, encountering poverty, wealth, drunken behaviour, sexual stuff, attempted murder, suicide and plenty of great clothes. All in three years.
White Oleander is a big, fat Hollywood movie based on the big, fat, beach-reading bestseller of the same name. It is to movie-going what standing up at the freezer eating a whole pint of ice cream is to eating; a guilty pleasure, we believe this is called, or "chick flick" to you, bub.
That's okay by us. White Oleander may leave you rolling your eyes in the dark, but that doesn't mean you won't like looking at it.
Michelle Pfeiffer and Alison Lohman are the mother-daughter team that fuel the narrative. Pfeiffer, beyond beautiful, plays an artist and mother capable of murder, a fabulously self-centred, manipulative woman who looks good in prison garb. Lohman is the daughter, a wide-eyed, mostly neglected innocent who finds herself being raised by strangers.
Stranger #1 is Robin Wright Penn, over-the-top (but good) as a born-again, low-end foster mother. Then there's Renee Zellweger, Stranger #2, as another foster mom (rich, neglected, sweet-natured) and Stranger #3, Svetlana Efremova, who plays the enterprising immigrant foster mother.
Our little heroine, eager to be a chameleon and go along with each household, learns from every experience along the way. What she learns appears to be about Fredericks of Hollywood, Calvin Klein and chic flea market, but that's probably just splitting hairs.
The plot? Er ... to thine own self be true. Something like that.
Patrick Fugit plays another foster child and the daughter's boyfriend. Noah Wyle and Cole Hauser play other negligible man roles. It doesn't matter. You won't notice their outfits.
White Oleander has drama and pathos and a bunch of hooey about mothers and daughters and abandonment, but it's mostly about hair and wigs. Alison Lohman gets roughed up at a juvenile hall and gets to go tough and give herself the de rigueur mutilation haircut. Later she goes dark brown.
Pfeiffer is practically a mermaid for the whole movie, sporting extensions that rival the look of Cousin It. Robin Wright Penn sports trailer trash 'dos and Renee Zellweger has some totally weird streak thing happening at the front of her wig. Hair is so crucial to the story that Lohman's dawning maturity is telegraphed through thicker, darker eyebrows.
It's pretty intense.
White Oleander is attractive nonsense, but the film manages to wind itself up with a strong, socially redeeming message: Love means never having to get out of prison.
You read it here first.
(This film is rated AA)
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