White Oleander – A Review
“It’s our secret. You can’t tell anybody,” her mother had told her. Astrid stared at the Polaroid artwork her mother Ingrid had made, looking deeply into her own young face her mother had placed in its center. “Mug shots,” she had called them. It was the loneliness assaulting their faces that Astrid noticed first, the way her mother had captured and cemented it into the frames that had been, if not the most compelling, then at least the most haunting aspect of the artwork. Ingrid had exploited her daughter’s pain entrapped in a moment in time as a selling point for the piece. Astride could only replied, “I won’t. I never tell our secrets.”
And what secrets were those? I’m not sure at this point in the film Astrid understood what those secrets were, but she felt them. They seemed at first subtle, even for me watching her life unfold on the screen, but they were to gain momentum in Astrid’s life.
Even as she was young she was thrust into the adult world were dark secrets reigned. At one point, her mother returns from a rendezvous with her boyfriend Barry after leaving Astrid curbside for what may have been hours. She looks at Astrid and mentioned that he’d made love to her. Astrid is a twelve year-old girl. I was struck by how open her mother was with her concerning such adult material, as if she is a replacement for a husband. Throughout the movie, her mother demands that Astrid fill a place in her life that has been void. She has shifted, in fact, her need for an intimate companion and projected that on her daughter.
But she is not alone. It seems the theme that pervades Astrid’s tumultuous adolescence, that one adult after another draws Astrid into troubles that had already existed long before she came onto the scene and expect her to conform to some need they have. In effect, they triangulate Astrid into relational problems they experience.
Her first experience as a foster child is with Starr Thomas, a troubled woman that apparently brings children in not as an overflow of compassion but as some sort of penance for a life she had lived that fills her still with of painful memories. She has found Jesus, or at least religion, but not yet discovered deep healing. And so Astrid is welcome as long as she brings stability to Starr’s world. But a lack of a father growing up has left its mark (or better, lack of mark) in Astrid’s heart, and the longing for the bond drives her to Starr’s boyfriend Ray. Starr’s world is upset, so she tries to destroy the threat – Astrid.
Next is Astrid’s experience with Claire and her husband Mark. Claire is a genuinely kind woman, but she too uses Astrid to fill a void in her heart. In this case, Mark is an absent husband, traveling frequently for work, and Claire a lonely workaholic’s widow. She brings Astrid in to assuage her loneliness, since the couple seems unable to have children of their own. But once Mark threatens to completely withdraw his affection and presence with Claire unless she “send her back,” (as if Astrid were a purchase made at the local department store or a rent-to-own piece of furniture), Claire is quick and desperate to agree. It is ironic that later Claire gives Astrid the counsel to “stay away from broken people.”
White Oleander is a compelling picture of a girl’s struggle to find identity and intimacy in a world full of broken and disjointed relationships. She retells her story backward, in a sense, starting as an adult examining the baggage of her past, literally portrayed as suitcases opened and decorated to the various roles she played in the lives of those who had impacted her in one form or another, each one retelling a different part of her past – foster homes, the orphanage, and her young and formative years with her mother. She begins her story by telling us that she “couldn’t understand the beginning until [she] had reached the end.” She could not tell us how she became the person she found herself to be without piecing together the pieces of the relational puzzle of her life. And although she considers each suitcase “a map of that that country… [she] will never revisit” she seems to inherently realize that that country formed much of who she became. Her mother had finally released her from the demand of coming through to fill the emptiness in her own soul, and Astrid came only then to realize that, as she put it, “no matter how flawed she is… I know my mother loves me.”
