Anywhere But Here
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Eileen Ryan, Hart Bochner, Natalie Portman, Ray Baker, Susan SarandonBrand: FOX Home Entertainment
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 114 minutes
Published: 2002-08-01
DVD Release Date: 2002-08-27
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Anywhere But Here
Movie Review: "The intelligent girls are inside"
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a movie about the competitive & conflicting relationships of mothers and daughters, and their rough journey to learn how to better communicate and understand each other. Ann, played by Natalie Portman, is the daughter of Adele, played by Susan Sarandon. Adele is domineering, excessively well-intentioned, and charismatic to a fault, believing often in appearances over substance.
Ann hates the level of invasive direction that she receives from her mother. She says to a police officer who is giving her mother a ticket: "You don't even understand. I'm going to leave her one of these days."
Officer: "I'm sure you will. But not today."
Ann: "Why not today?"
Officer: "Well you should leave her when you're calm. When you're rational. You leave her when you're ready not to come back. You understand?"
The same officer plays a pivotal role, once early in the film, and once near the end. The timing of his appearances in the screenplay are not incidental. The officer is ultimately setting up a social test for the daughter to consider, a test he hopes will deter the daughter from leaving unwarrantedly and not before she exhausts every option she can discover. And he speaks with conviction and earnest, probably because he has personally seen what harm can come from people leaving each other or talking to each other when they are not calm or rational.
Sometimes when I hear daughters complaining about the faults of their mothers, I think, "That is very bad. But it's probably not as bad as what your mother had to endure with her mother." We live in a "story rich" world, where we are exposed to thousands of novels, TV, and movies that can give us relationship examples of how to better relate with each other. Our parent's parent's generation had far less social education and diverse social modeling to examine and compare. They had few parenting guides, no internet, and few social examples beyond their own family.
Adele discovers that Ann wants to live on the other side of the country. Ann comes home to find her mother has opened her mail and says, "You opened it?" Adele replies, "Well, how else am I going to know how you're planning your life? I mean after all I'm only your mother. Why would you confide in me? Thank you very much. Go ahead, open it. I'm sure you'll be very happy. PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND? Could you have gotten any farther away from me?"
Adele is admittedly selfish, irresponsible, and "the lights go out sometimes." And in the final scene with the officer, she says, "Did she tell you any of the good things that I did? Because I did a lot of good things. She's always had a warm home, food and clothing. And I got her into the Beverly Hills school system. Did she tell you that? You know, she could have been an actress, but instead she's going away to college. Doesn't she know that I would do anything for her? I mean, I love her. She is the reason that I was born. Doesn't she understand that I would do anything for her?" The officer replies, "Then, you know what to do." And Adele does IT. She sells her prized car that brought them to LA and facilitates Ann going away from her and to the other side of the country, so Ann can pursue her own, separate dreams. Adele lets go. Adele doesn't lose her level of love for her daughter. She doesn't diminish her level of attachment to her daughter. But she let's go.
The officer can see the conflicts of the mother & daughter and he tries to lead by example. He starts by exampling forgiveness. "I'll tell you what. This is what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to let you go . . . Watch the signs PLEASE." This is a beautiful movie and I recommend it to any person who wants to improve fractured relations with family members.
Summary of Anywhere But Here
Adele is flashy, flirtatious dreamer. Her daughter Ann is a quiet, no-nonsense realist. On the surface, they're like oil and water, but deep down there are two of a kind. "Susan Sarandon is show-stopping" (The New York Times) and "Natalie Portman soars" (NY-1) in this funny and touching story about a mother who knows best and a daughter who knows better!In Wayne Wang's star-driven adaptation of Mona Simpson's tragicomic bestseller about a mismatched mother and daughter, fortysomething Adele August (Susan Sarandon) is every adolescent's nightmare: over- (or under-) dressed, always and loudly "on," forgetful of mundane matters such as bills, more colorful kid than reliable mum. In contrast, 14-year-old Ann (Natalie Portman) yearns for stability, roots, understated hues. Transplanted from Wisconsin small town and extended family to a Beverly Hills, California, address of choice for American Dreamers like Adele, Ann comes painfully of age--sometimes blighted but also enriched by the fictions of a charismatic parent afraid to be alone in the dark.
Wang has always shown a sure, caring hand when it comes to cross-generational angst (see Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, The Joy Luck Club, Smoke). Here, he encourages Sarandon in a remarkably brave, exposed performance as an aging adventuress whose imagination continually outstrips her ability to make dreams come true, whose charm is both her ticket to ride and a dead end. Portman's pout of strained adolescent distaste soon wears thin, but when The Phantom Menace's kabuki princess momentarily thaws, she projects a lost child's terrible shock and confusion. Hollywood-sized and scripted by the numbers, Anywhere but Here lost ground to Tumbleweeds, a similarly themed but more nuanced indie (with Oscar-nominated Janet McTeer), and it can't hold a candle to Barbara Stanwyck's Stella Dallas (1937), top of the line in this particular genre. But for any daughter who's looked into her mother's face and--yikes!--seen a possible future, this trip's definitely worth taking. --Kathleen Murphy
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