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White Oleander
(Reviewed September 5, 2002)
-
Maybe they should have called it "Florence Gump."
After her mother (the embarrassingly intense Michelle Pfeiffer) gets sent up the river for murder, can't-win teen Astrid (Alison Lohman) is shuffled from one mega-melodramatic foster home setting to another. Those painful pitstops along life's damned rough highway range from the desert digs of a white-trash Jesus freak straight out of "Jerry Springer" (Robin Wright Penn) to a hellacious orphanage that's enough to make a girl tear her hair out (or at least chop it off with a pocketknife) to a preposterously lush Malibu movie-star mansion (with Renee Zellweger and Noah Wyle) to a flea-market gypsy goth-girl commune run by somebody who sounds like Natasha from "Rocky and Bullwinkle."
Although Lohman does an okay job of acting morose, betrayed and sullen, and you can't help being interested in what fresh hell she will be dropped into next, there's something very "Oprah's Book Club" about it all. It's like the uber "chick flick."
(Also, this may sound funny coming from a Libertarian atheist, but will Hollywood ever tire of releasing "look at the awful Christians" movies? Ever notice how whenever Christian characters appear in films, they always are portrayed as hypocritical, repressed, delusional or moronic? Believe it or not, I've actually known Christians (from Catholics to born-agains) who were Actual Human Beings--but to Hollywood, they are the regarded as the last safe, easy-target stereotype to ridicule. Maybe members of the WGA and DGA should get out more.)
Two things I did like about this movie: There's no "battered wife" rationalization for what Astrid's boyfriend-murdering mom did; she's pretty much just a mean bitch. And when Zellweger's ex-B-actress character is showing Astrid one of her old movies, the clip used is from 1994's "Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre," in which Zellweger actually did appear, which was kind of a clever touch.
Back Row Grade: C-
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