Review: White Oleander
Genre: Drama
MPAA rating: R (mature themes, sexuality, drugs, violence)
Running time: 1:49
Release date: 2002
Cast: Alison Lohman, Robin Wright-Penn, Noah Wyle, Renée Zellweger, Michelle Pfeiffer
Directed by: Peter Kosminsky
Related article: Pfeiffer shows her hard edges in 'Oleander'

A Gothic Goldilocks, White Oleander follows adolescent Astrid as she falls through the rotting floorboards of the California foster-care system. After experiences with families and group homes that would make Oliver Twist look coddled, Astrid learns how to mother herself — with a little help from one mama bear.

Astrid's own mom, Ingrid, is unavailable. She's in prison awaiting trial for allegedly murdering an ex-lover. But even from maximum security, the mercurial and manipulative Ingrid knows how to pluck a weeper on Astrid's heartstrings.

Stronger on character than on story, the film version of Janet Fitch's best-seller is shaped and propelled by the astonishing performance of Alison Lohman, whose Astrid conveys that porcelain fragility and steel-reinforced will unique to teenage girls.

Lohman is supported by Hollywood's Most Blonded, two of whom are superlative. Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Wright Penn and Renée Zellweger, respectively play Astrid's biological, foster and spiritual mothers.

With cheekbones that cut like broken glass and those burning-cold glacier eyes, Pfeiffer is a revelation as monster mom Ingrid, an artist (in the book she was a poet) who puts work, self and paramours first, leaving her daughter a distant fourth. It's not Ingrid's love that makes Astrid feel protected and supported, it's her iron determination, annealed in prison.

As Starr, Astrid's first foster mother, the fine actress Penn has an impossible role to play and plays it accordingly. Starr is a born-again Christian and recovering alcoholic who preaches love, charity and forgiveness but practices hate, exploitation and revenge, shooting Astrid for the girl's flirtation (or affair) with Starr's live-in-boyfriend. In the scenes involving Starr and Astrid, one senses that filmmaker Peter Kosminsky is holding his nose at the stench of trailer trash.

If Ingrid is too hard and Starr too soft-headed, just right is Claire, the affluent actress wife of a filmmaker (Noah Wyle). Insecure but outgoing, Claire is the first person to reach out to Astrid with warmth and love. Zellweger plays Claire with a soul bright and warm as the sun.

Once you get past the stunning performances, though, this film from British TV director Kosminsky is so elliptical that unless you've read the novel you're not entirely certain what the title means.

Ubiquitous oleander, which is to the Southern California landscape as rhododendron is to Southeastern Pennsylvania's, is poisonous. This might refer to the Ingrid/Astrid relationship (both women are pale and Mom is toxic), or to the means of the ex-lover's death — or both.

Despite the elisions necessary to making a sprawling book a trim feature-length film, White Oleander exerts undeniable power. Its fairy-tale horror is remarkably potent, with Astrid as the Goldilocks intruder seeking asylum and inevitably seen as a usurper. Both screenwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue's adaptation of the novel and the actress' interpretation of their characters distill the message of that wonderful, horrible fairy tale: One becomes oneself only as one defines herself against another.