'White Oleander' Captures Novel's Drama in Rushed Format

"White Oleander"

4 Stars

The more extreme the physical beauty, the more trauma and dysfunction is masked by that beauty in the blonde-ridden movie adaptation of Janet Fitch's "White Oleander."

Following the lines of the novel, the film centers on Ingrid Magnussen (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her daughter Astrid (Alison Lohman), a distinctly Aryan mother-daughter team.

But beneath the facades of their appearances, both Ingrid and Astrid -- along with the other women featured in the film -- aren't anywhere as close to true perfection as they might seem at the beginning of the story.

Though overtly telling the story of Astrid's life in foster care while her mother serves life in prison for murder, the film actually depicts the dynamic between Astrid and Ingrid.

This plot may sound like the perfect setup for an estrogen fest. But it stays true enough to Fitch's psychological and dramatic novel to prevent comparisons to humorous and less weighty chick flicks like "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."

There's little to laugh at in the course of Astrid's travels from temporary home to temporary home, from the outside world to the prison-walled environment of her manipulative but enrapturing mother and from complete captivity to struggling freedom.

But the characters are sometimes amusing for their oddly believable eccentricities.

Robin Wright Penn -- another blonde -- dramatically diverges from memorable past roles such as Buttercup in "The Princess Bride."

Taking on the part of Starr, a short-skirted cleavage-sporting foster mother, her catch phrase quickly becomes, "Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?"

Each foster family incident is dramatically set yet illustrated with restraint by director Peter Kosminsky. The film works much like a book, with sections devoted to each of the families and interludes both with Ingrid and with Astrid's graphic-novelist-in-training love interest (Patrick Fugit).

The story only suffers from the essential nature of translation from paper to the big screen -- compression. With fewer foster families to harden Astrid along the way and without much of the sensually detailed imagery of the novel, "White Oleander" becomes far more straightforward, and a bit rushed, in film form.

Personalities are less developed, and many essential facets of the novel were obviously placed in the dustbin in favor of achieving an accessible 110-minute running time.

Leaving bits of the plot to the imagination, some cuts suggest that pivotal features of the storyline, such as sexual interludes, were discarded to keep a PG-13 rating and thus allow for a wider range of filmgoers.

Though these manipulations satisfy the length and rating requirements guaranteed to draw a wider range of filmgoers into theaters, they also alienate the audience a bit more than necessary and could potentially confuse viewers who cannot fill in the gaps from having read the novel.

Nevertheless, superb acting and a captivating pace make "White Oleander" an engrossing film that takes familiar actors and casts them in new, intriguing positions. Pfeiffer and Lohman dominate the film -- the mother's detached and methodical methods of destruction clash with the daughter's continual attempts, and failures, to escape domination and to find some warmth.

"White Oleander" makes the greatest impact as a book, but the story survives and is well-told on screen.

Through flawless acting, the film manages to provoke thought and to create a complex world, one that isn't so pumped with blonde estrogen as to become a cliche.

The Arts & Entertainment Editor can be reached at artsdesk@unc.edu.