Oprah's Book Club, for all the good it did for reading as a pastime, still has a lot to answer for. Swiftly becoming a brand, a genre unto itself, the novels selected for Oprah's Book Club were almost uniformly of a piece and could often be identified in advance of its appearance on Winfrey's show.
Janet Fitch's "White Oleander" was such a book, a book about family secrets and eventual female empowerment, part and parcel of what came to typify the Book Club's selections: Lifetime network made-for-TV plots with enough of a literary sheen to earn some respectability. The result is a bit more credibility, to say nothing of popularity, than books of a certain mold might deserve.
That said, "White Oleander" is not, strictly speaking, the worst choice for adaptation: a little more technically proficient than some of Oprah's choices, a little wider in scope. "Beaches" screenwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue compresses the timeframe of "White Oleander" and its protagonist, Astrid, into a three-year period starting when Astrid is 15.
Astrid, played by newcomer Alison Lohman, is whisked off to a series of foster homes after her mother Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer) is apprehended by police for murdering her boyfriend. Away from the imposing will of her artist mother, Astrid is taken care of by Starr (Robin Wright Penn), a lower-class born-again Christian with a troubled daughter of her own and two small children, as well as a live-in boyfriend named Ray (Cole Hauser of "Tigerland"). Astrid blends in with Starr's world of neon pink spandex and Sunday services, much to imprisoned Ingrid's irritation, until problems boiling under the surface bring Astrid's stay to a dramatic end.
After a stint in a juvenile detention center, site of Astrid's rebirth as "prison" tough girl and a brief romance with comic book artist Paul (Patrick Fugit of "Almost Famous"), Astrid is sent to live with a director and his b-movie starlet wife Claire (Noah Wyle, playing creepy, and Renee Zellweger). Any happiness Astrid finds with Claire and her always-absent husband is short-lived; a disastrous visit to see Ingrid in jail precipitates a meltdown that leaves Astrid without a home.
Continually dogged by Ingrid's interference from beyond incarceration, Astrid eventually hooks up with an unscrupulous Russian immigrant and the group of orphan girls she uses as cheap labor. Left at the end of her rope, Astrid labors for her new money-hungry "mother" until a visit from Ingrid's lawyer changes things: Lie under oath in Ingrid's retrial and she's free of Ingrid's manipulation forever.
"White Oleander" aims for certain things and for the most part hits them: Astrid's isolation and protean emotional state; the predatory and selfish maneuvers of Ingrid. Much of the film's strength rests on the excellence of its cast. Lohman as Astrid believably carries the film, appearing in nearly every scene, giving Astrid a youthful vulnerability that gradually gives way to the knee-jerk cynicism of three years later.
Zellweger also plays her small role to the hilt, making Claire pathetic and sweet at the same time (the use of a clip of Zellweger from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation" to demonstrate Claire's film career is a clever in-joke).
Only Pfeiffer's Ingrid never really comes across as real. For a character on whom so much of the film's dramatic weight rests, Ingrid never quite earns the influence she appears to wield. Prone to passionate monologues and non-advice advice ("Our beauty is our strength;" "Loneliness is the human condition"), Ingrid is alternately meant to suggest female empowerment and the domineering mother hen. This unstable definition of Ingrid adds little but junior-high profundities ("You and I are both in prison," Ingrid writes to her daughter) and drains many of Ingrid and Astrid's visits of meaning.
"White Oleander" is not without its strengths -- Peter Kosminsky, directing his first feature film, does an admirable job keeping his top-shelf cast moving through the episodic progression of Astrid's young life. Relentlessly melodramatic and, on occasion, even dull, "White Oleander" works almost despite itself and reveals enough genuine warmth to almost get past the limitations of its source material. It's the lingering sense of self-importance and condensed movie-of-the-week plot that holds it back from being a truly effective, emotionally resonant film.
"White Oleander" opened in Milwaukee Fri., Oct. 11.
