White Oleander: B

Michelle Pfeiffer plays a great bitch. In such films as Hairspray and Stardust, the actress has shown her indomitable skill as a live-action, modern, Cruella de Vil. And in Batman Returns and White Oleander, she expanded her range portraying a pair of women who subvert all experience, fitting each conflict into their own respective hot-boxes of feminine empowerment. For Batman, that meant Pfeiffer had to bend to the freaky-Goth-maestro Tim Burton as light-S&M vixen Catwoman; for Oleander, she wears nothing as flattering as a leather-corset, and wields nothing as intimidating as a 20-foot whip, yet her character Ingrid Magnussen is a harrowing villain. Or, at least, she should have been; she even was, for a time, in Janet Finch’s novel on which Peter Kosminksy’s film is based. But on screen, with cheekbones that could cut glass and a stare that freezes blood, the audience is repeatedly begged to sympathize, to understand her, as mother/murderer. Surrounded by Finch’s florid, venomously entrancing prose, the reader was never so belittled; and the fact that they are now is just the flash-point for everything tidy and Hallmark about a literary adaptation that merely stings where it should have scalded.

But the movie isn’t necessarily about Ingrid, not really. On both page and screen, the narrative bildungsroman centers on her daughter, Astrid (Alison Lohman), forced to go through a cycle of foster homes after her mother commits first-degree murder. Again, part of the ugly, unruly sprawl of the novel is cleaned up, shined for the film. The first home Astrid is sent to is still the abode of Starr (Robin Wright Penn), and she still falls into a sexual tryst with Starr’s live-in boyfriend Ray (Cole Hauser); but now Starr is perkier, oddly more wholesome as a white-trash Desperate Housewife. And Ray is no longer the schlub that plays a major-role in Astrid’s brief sexual oddyssey - he’s a blue-collar hunk. This sensibility extends past Starr’s home and on toward the other foster-parents Astrid finds herself in the care of. Tellingly, writer Mary Agnes Donoghue leaves out Amelia Ramos, the upper-crust business woman who maintains a disciplined home of foster-girls/slaves whom she regularly starves. Perhaps she assumed we couldn’t take the viciousness of our heroine’s plight, but part of the pull of the book is in the continuing blossoms of cruelty and beauty Astrid regularly encounters - a cunning metaphor perpetually tied together by the recurring image of the White Oleander.

The plot-structure (even though it axes two of the homes Astrid lives in) remains faithful, a skill the director employed to similar solid effect in his adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. And just as there, Kosminsky uses cut-away shots of the landscape (in this case, the hot Santa Ana winds blowing through the trees) to communicate internal turmoil. But he still stumbles, here as there, no matter the number of great actresses he employs. Donoghue’s script is a distillation - an admirable one, too - that occasionally lapses into reduction. The relationship between the beautiful aesthete who calls herself Ingrid and her daughter is nowhere near as soulfully strained as it was in Finch’s book; instead it becomes a series of tearful confrontations/therapy sessions. And the series of bumps and obstacles Astrid overcomes or is overcome by to discover her individual self are lineated and romanticized (e.g. her relationship with fellow foster Paul Trout) when they shouldn’t be. The complex overlapping leaves and deadly blooms that marked Oleander the book are pruned back into a pretty, affecting, and pretty tame movie.

Alison Lohman is a near revelation: willowy and resilient, observant and intelligent. And grand kudos are in order for each of the willing women who embody the various emotionally cracked/destroyed/manipulative/insecure characters who flit in and out of Astrid’s life. Formerly mentioned were Pfeiffer and Penn, but there’s also Renée Zellweger, Svetlana Efremova, and Amy Aquino - each portraying with virtuoso skill their intermeshing personalities that come together to school their collective charge on such Big Themes as her place in life, womahood, and child-parent relationships. But one still gets the nagging thought that the writer and director don’t really so much care about all of these things, so much as rather or not we connect with Ingrid. In the book, that was hard to do, and we weren’t exactly pressured into it. But the film almost demands such an act from its audience; and the strain nearly overwhelms the delicate, lyrical, occasionally profound, mostly-average film sheltered beneath.