White Oleander

The metaphoric title about the danger in beautiful things sounds like something from Byron or Keats, but this compressed film adaptation of an Oprah-endorsed bestseller plays like the Dickens. Its central character, Astrid (Lohman), an impressionable teenager shuttled from Los Angeles foster home to foster home after her mother is imprisoned for murder, is subjected to a hellish journey of self-realization that never lets up. To paraphrase a line once uttered by the great character actress Thelma Ritter, there's everything but bloodhounds snapping at her rear end. Among other things, Astrid is seduced by a father figure, gets shot by a jealous wife, and wakes up next to a corpse, but the film would have you believe that the worst thing to happen to its Little Nell is that she is her mother's daughter. True, the steely Ingrid (Pfeiffer) is scary -- a blue-eyed artist with long, blond hair, she's Nietzsche by way of Joni Mitchell. The film aspires to explain, in a maddeningly piecemeal fashion, how the impossibly stunning Ingrid has poisoned Astrid's life, but with much of their history not revealed until the end of the film's third act, you never fully appreciate Astrid's desire to find the antidote to her mother's venomous influence. In appearance, Pfeiffer may realize Ingrid's physicality, but she fails to consistently sense the contradictions in her character's maternal instincts. There's something classically tragic about this monstrous materfamilias -- she's like Medea, or Clytemnestra -- but all too often, she's nothing more than just a bad mother here. Newcomer Lohman is a little vague in her early scenes, no doubt to convey Astrid's bland innocence, but with time, her performance blooms in White Oleander. (At one point, Lohman's resemblance to Pfeiffer is really eerie.) Although the film's tidy ending has zero emotional pull, even after all the abuse heaped upon poor Astrid, Lohman's performance takes you further along than you remotely thought possible.