Anywhere But Here

Released 1999
Stars Susan Sarandon, Natalie Portman, Eileen Ryan, Ray Baker, John Diehl, Shawn Hatosy, Bonnie Bedelia
Directed by Wayne Wang

Wayne Wang's "Anywhere But Here" is about a frustrated mother who believes she is rotting away in a small Wisconsin town. She buys a used Mercedes, shoves her teenage daughter inside, and drives them cross-country 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. That is the plan, anyway. Her daughter, who has not been consulted, is angry and resentful at being yanked away from the family she loves, and doesn't share her mother's social-climbing obsessions (their first apartment isn't in "the posh part of Beverly Hills, but it's in the school district").

The affordable streets they live on reminded me of "The Slums of Beverly Hills," the 1998 movie where jobless Alan Arkin steers his kids into the same school system, but "Anywhere But Here" isn't a ripoff of the earlier movie--it's more as if the mom saw it, and made up her mind to try the same thing. For that matter, it's based on Mona Simpson's 1987 novel, so the inspiration may have traveled the other way.

The mother is Adele August (Susan Sarandon), sexy, wildly optimistic, consumed by her visions. Her daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) is a serious kid, smart and observant, who is tired of her mom's sudden inspirations. Adele is right and wrong about her plan: wrong to leave the way she does, because going away to college might have provided a saner transition for her daughter. Right that her second husband Ted, Ann's stepfather, "will always be an ice skating instructor," and Ann's fate is not to be "a nothing girl in a nothing factory in a nothing town." Adele waited too long to make her own move and doesn't want Ann to make the same mistake.

Summary by Roger Ebert