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Go ahead now and paint me with a big red “Y” for the chromosome that will be invoked if I get castigated for not fawning over Anywhere But Here, a trans-generational teaming of a couple of Hollywood’s most talented women, Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. (Geez, you can’t win -- if you call a movie a “chick flick” they [meaning, she] accuse you of narrowminded insensitivity; if you just say, “I didn’t like it all that much,” they come back with, “Well, we’d hardly expect a man to appreciate a womyn’s movie.”) They play Adele and Ann, a mother and daughter who pack up and move from Wisconsin (hmmm...see above) to B.H. at the insistence of Adele, who needs a change of pace after her second divorce. She’s got an interview lined up for a teaching position, a new old Mercedes, and acting ambitions for Ann, who would much rather be exploring her post-pubescent early teens in a familiar locale. From there it’s a mostly plotless series of vignettes set over the course of three or four years, as often irrational Adele does her best to alienate her only child, who “vants to be a-loannn.” They move on through a succession of apartments, tragedies, jobs, and clumsy affairs, caring deeply about each other despite Mom’s apparent, but unconfirmed, unexplained, clinical insanity.
Scripted, from Mona Simpson’s novel, by Alvin Sargent (who wrote, among many other notable accomplishments, Ordinary People), and directed by Wayne Wang (who did my favorite film of 1995, Smoke), Anywhere But Here is filled with visceral, supremely well-acted familial interplay that may be uncomfortably realistic to anybody who wasn’t raised by wolves. But the unstructured plot, through which the passing of time is difficult to track, does little to explain what makes Adele tick. In the end she acquires some hard-earned insight to her daughter, but neither Ann nor the audience knows much more about her.
I wouldn’t have minded having a Kleenex concession in the lobby, though. B-
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