Movie Review: White Oleander (2002)

A mother-daughter drama, White Oleander is full of spiky surprises, excellent performances, and heartache.

In New York, budding artist Astrid Magnussen (Alison Lohman) recalls her childhood in flashback. She never knew her father, and was raised in California by her fiercely independent mother Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), a somewhat famous visual artist. Astrid is just 15 years old when Ingrid is arrested and convicted for the murder of her lover. 

Astrid becomes a ward of the state and lives in foster homes with stints at the McKinney Children's Centre. Her character is shaped by foster mothers including Jesus-loving former stripper Starr (Robin Wright), fading actress Claire (Renée Zellweger), and Russian thrift market hustler Rena. Throughout, Astrid keeps visiting Ingrid in prison, and gradually starts to understand the level of control and manipulation her mother is capable of.

An adaptation of the Janet Fitch book, White Oleander weaves an impressive tapestry of complex human interactions. The screenplay by Mary Agnes Donoghue does at times strike the episodic tones of book chapters, but director Peter Kosminsky charts a course towards a cohesive narrative packed with the painful but also realistic travails of an adolescent dangerously close to falling through the cracks.

The film's strength is derived from the gradual unveiling of Ingrid's core, and the corresponding impact on Astrid. Ingrid starts as a role model for the liberated and successful single mom raising her daughter to be just as strong. Her arrest for murder arrives early and is just the first of many shocks to rock Astrid's life. Subsequently, and despite the prison walls separating them, Ingrid's remarkable character traits are exposed through the eyes of her daughter. Astrid develops a distaste towards the dark side of individualism and starts to question, rather than simply accept, her mother's uncompromising and self-centred actions. Eventually, themes of loneliness, betrayal, narcissism, and despondency merge into a complex definition of a woman determined to confront the world on her own terms.

Meanwhile Astrid evolves under the influence of foster mothers. She discovers the power of her own sexuality, and in Starr and Claire finds common traits of superficial domesticity obscuring churning dissatisfaction. Love lost or sought is always part of the fuel mix driving the mothers' behaviour, and the exceptional power of love to cause hurt and initiate healing emerges as an overarching arc.

With men a sideshow, the women-dominated cast is excellent with two stand-out performances. From her prison courtyard Michelle Pfeiffer radiates chilling levels of emotional domination and an immense capacity to scorch the earth around her daughter's life. And in her breakthrough role Alison Lohman is a revelation, navigating Astrid's frequently tragic journey with convincing transitions towards adulthood and assertiveness. Robin Wright and Renée Zellweger provide memorable support, but their different-but-the-same foster mothers are more predictable.

Emotive without descending into sentimentality, White Oleander seeks the tenacious pursuit of individual growth despite life's lurking poisons.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Where The Truth Lies (2005)

A neo-noir murder mystery set in the world of celebrity decadence, Where The Truth Lies boasts an ambitious plot, a complex structure, and magnificent period sets, but is also beset by muddled perspectives and excessive narration.

The movie unfolds in two time frames. In the late 1950s, the superstar duo of Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) are a top nightclub entertainment act, highly sought after for fund-raising telethons. Their fame affords them the finest luxuries in life and limitless access to drugs, alcohol, and women. Reuben (David Hayman) is Lanny's loyal fixit man, while New Jersey mobster Sally (Maury Chaykin) uses Vince and Lanny to generate publicity for his hotel properties.

In the early 1970s, journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) secures an assignment to interview Vince, now a fading has-been in Los Angeles. Her magazine is willing to pay Vince $1 million for a tell-all about the glory years, as long as he also talks about the mysterious case of Maureen O'Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard), a hotel maid found dead in the New Jersey hotel suite of Vince and Lanny when they were at the height of their fame. While on her assignment Karen coincidentally also meets the still charismatic Lanny, and is drawn into the shroud of sordid secrets surrounding the two men.

Written and directed by Atom Egoyan, Where The Truth Lies is classy and glitzy adult-oriented entertainment, wrapping commentary on the trappings of fame around a lascivious unsolved mystery featuring a nude dead woman found in a tub. Never less than gripping, the film demands concentration and rewards it with visual splendour, a gradual peeling of glamour to reveal the darkest rotten core of celebrity culture, and a study of two complex men far removed from their public personas.

The film jumps back and forth between the present and the past, and the flashbacks to the late 1950s feature two key locales in Florida and New Jersey on either side of an epic telethon. The narration is intended to evoke noir fundamentals, but similar to all the time jumping, Egoyan pushes beyond what is necessary. With Lanny writing his own book, Vince providing selective commentary, Karen delving into a world she knows little about and even her friend Bonnie (Sonja Bennett) getting in on the storytelling, multiple perspectives, some of them unreliable, compound the various dates and places to create a proper maze of orientation.

Egoyan calls upon themes of warped reality from Alice In Wonderland and lobsters as representations of both luxury cuisine and bottom-crawling moral bankruptcy to pile on metaphorical layers. And several sex scenes leave little to the imagination, the story of Vince and Lanny intertwined with sexual adventurism and crashing hard against personal and societal limits.

While the audacity is undeniable, so are the film's weaknesses. Karen has a connection with Lanny from a childhood appearance on a telethon, but no one has a connection with the victim Maureen, who remains a blank presence for too long despite a clumsy visit with her still grieving mother. Alison Lohman is miscast and unable to convince or generate the necessary depth, the actress often flattened by her character's baroque prose. And finally after all the elaborate plot and indulgent format machinations, Egoyan somehow arrives at one of the oldest and blandest resolutions in the mystery genre.

But despite the potholes, Where The Truth Lies is refreshingly daring, a modern twist on classic themes of hubris and the dangers lurking behind the curtain of applause.



All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Drag Me To Hell (2009)

A simple morality tale turned into a cheeky horror film with a clever streak of understated humour, Drag Me To Hell is a refreshingly original and quite enjoyable movie.

Polite and timid Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is a bank loan officer, eyeing a promotion to the vacant Assistant Manager job. Pressured to demonstrate toughness, Christine turns down a desperate request by the elderly and quite creepy Sylvia Ganush to extend a home loan. This turns out to be a big mistake: the humiliated Ganush lays a humdinger of a curse on Christine, releasing the evil Lamia spirit to terrorize her.

Christine has the support of boyfriend Clay (Justin Long), and also seeks the advice of fortune teller Rham Jas; but neither can help much when uncompromising evil descends on her. Invisible forces invade her house and slap her around; a persistent black fly enters her stomach through her mouth; Ganush dies, but her image continues to reappear in various hideous forms to cause terror. Christine realizes that this will only end when Lamia kills her and drags her to hell (of course). She needs to find a way to break the curse to save her life, and unfortunately this may mean that someone else will have to suffer.

Director and horror master Sam Raimi wrote the script with his brother Ivan, and he overlays the sustained tension of Drag Me To Hell with a genuine sense of fun. There are sharp comic moments, never more than in the dinner scene when Clay introduces Christine to his parents while she is losing her mind because of Lamia's noisy antics. Even the early pivotal attack by Ganush on Christine in the deserted bank parkade manages to introduce snarky wit into a life and death struggle: Christine defends herself with a stapler and, temporarily at least, staples shut Ganush's ugly eye.

Alison Lohman makes for an appealing heroine and central victim, taking the role almost entirely seriously although once or twice a shadow of a smile does almost cross her lips. Justin Long has less to do as the supportive boyfriend, and thankfully the script avoids saddling him with any big speeches. Lorna Raver as the evil Ganush and Dileep Rao as the half smarmy, half effective fortune teller Rham provide plenty of background colour.

Some of the scenes don't work too well: things go bump in Christine's apartment for too long, and a seance involving a goat goes a bit over the top. But Drag Me To Hell is all about the penalty to be paid when selfish acts are committed, even by good people. And who knew that in a small, unpretentious package, being dragged to hell can be the source of no small amount of entertainment.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.