Anywhere But Here

Anywhere But Here

“Anywhere But Here” by Wayne Wang tells the story of a mother who feels trapped in a small-town life and buys a used Mercedes, stuffs her adolescent daughter into it and drives them both to Beverly Hills, where she will put her master’s degree in early education to work and her daughter will go to auditions and be discovered by the movies.

At least, that’s the plan. The daughter (who wasn’t consulted) is furious at being wrenched away from the family she loves (“I hate you!”), doesn’t share her mother’s social-climbing obsessions (“It’s not even in the posh part of Beverly Hills but it’s in the school district”) and having been forced out of Wisconsin vows never to leave it again.

The cheap side streets they live on reminded me of “The Slums of Beverly Hills,” the 1998 movie where unemployed Alan Arkin steers his kids into that same school system, but “Anywhere But Here” isn’t a remake or ripoff of that earlier film; it’s as if Adele saw it, then resolved to try the same thing. For that matter, it was based on Mona Simpson’s 1987 novel so maybe the influence flowed in the other direction.

The mother is Adele August (Susan Sarandon), sexy, wildly optimistic and consumed with self-delusion about other people: They don’t know what they want until they’ve had sex with her. Her daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) is serious-minded, smart and observant; she grew up watching women walk out on her mom after one-night stands. She usually knows better than to trust men who wear turtlenecks

Adele believes strongly in her plan: It’s wrong for Ann to remain among these people because everyone here has already made up their minds about everybody else, whereas there nobody knows anything about them yet! And she insists that this is just another case of Ann not wanting her mother to be happy, which I’m sure the shrinks would agree with. So we do learn that Adele has these highs and lows but it’s made clear enough in the movie that she’s simply an immature dreamer who needs grow up.

Adele’s half-right about everything wrong to leave Wisconsin like this because going away for college might have provided a saner transition for Ann; right that Ted, her second husband (Ann’s stepfather), “will always be an ice skating instructor” and therefore Ann does not have to settle down into being “a nothing girl in a nothing factory in a nothing town” because Adele waited too long before making her own move and doesn’t want Ann making same mistake! Parents have been living through children since time began.

Living in Beverly Hills is hard on both of them. Ann gets along OK at school, but her mother is insecure behind all those brassy fronts and can’t bring herself to go to the kind of posh holiday party she moved all the way here from Wisconsin not to attend. She lies to herself about one-night stands, like the Hollywood dentist Josh Spritzer (Hart Bochner) whom she picks up during dental surgery: “He’s more than just a dentist. He’s writing a screenplay.” Meanwhile Ann attracts the attention of Peter (Corbin Allred), a nice kid who quotes T.S. Eliot while jogging always a good sign though having seen what passes for romance around this house.

The movie is not about the episodic and “colorful” plot, but about the performances. Adele is made by Sarandon into a person that’s almost impossible to tolerate. This ain’t Auntie Mame; it’s somebody with deep conflicts and inappropriate ways of dealing with them. And so, too, is Ann complex. The film is narrated in her voice (“mother made an amazing amount of noise when she ate, like she was trying to take on the whole world”), and her drift seems to be that her mother did the right thing in all the wrong ways for all the wrong reasons.

When a family tragedy brings them back to Wisconsin, “the streets weren’t as wide, the trees seemed lower, the houses smaller.” Trickier and harder for Sarandon; more attention will be paid to Portman. Her big break was in “The Phantom Menace,” where she played young Queen Amidala but her talent also shone through in “Beautiful Girls” (1996), where she was just this side of puberty and vibrated with well, goodwill and loveliness, I’d say. In “Anywhere But Here,” she’s dragged along by a mother who knows no control, and her best scenes are when she fights back not emotionally but observationally.

Alvin Sargent wrote the script; he’s got a knack for stories about kids in trouble (“The Sterile Cuckoo,” “Ordinary People”). Here he has two fine supporting characters: Peter quoting poetry but also a cousin named Benny (Shawn Hatosy) back home who’s her best friend and soul mate; these kids not a snobbish richer high school classmate give us some reality; you get the feeling of teenagers trying to build rational lives out of whatever their parents have left lying around or blew apart.

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