Director Wayne Wang (Joy Luck Club) adds his deft touch as he returns to his forte, the story of mother and daughter struggling through intergenerational tensions. One of the deepest and most painful ironies in our human makeup is in the dynamics of separation from the maternal bond, especially by a daughter who grows from childhood to womanhood through the complex terrain of adolescence. Anywhere But Here is the intimate, moving, tender, and wacky depiction of one mother’s and daughter’s navigation of this emotionally twisting and rocky terrain. This kind of intimate relationship portrait is risky in an action media like film, but Anywhere But Here works in no small part because of the pairing of the huge talents of Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman.

The mother, Adele August (Susan Sarandon), flees a confining life of small town Wisconsin where she is burdened by her mother, brother, and inattentive second husband. She takes off to Beverly Hills in a desperate search for more glamour and enchantment. Adele loads her baggage and her 14-year-old daughter, Ann (Natalie Portman), whom she intends to make into a movie star.

Adele is wacky and full of optimistic delusion and aphorisms. As the realities of run down, but still expensive apartments, bills, and a teaching job she dislikes close in, her mood swings precipitously. She goes from manic highs of excursions to the ice cream store, expensive restaurants, shopping, and house hunting in the mansions of Beverly Hills, to the panic and depression of unpaid electric bills. Adele has no love life and becomes more and more dependent on her daughter for emotional support.

Ann, though full of the sarcasm and resentment of a modern teen, wants nothing more than to be away from her mother and back home in Wisconsin. Ann rejects the whole thought of being an actress. In fact, more often than not, Ann is the adult forcing her mother to face realities and to get out of bed at the onslaught of depression.

There is no man in the lives of these women, and Adele’s Pollyanna delusion leads to an emotional shredding when she entertains a vain hope that a pumped up, pretty dentist who took her for a one night stand might become a real love interest. Ann watches this knowing, even in her inexperience, that tragedy is looming.

In this gross description, the jilting seems trite, but in the movie, the personal pain leads to an ever more palpable "ouch" while we watch Adele deny and then realize her error of clinging to a belief that she can somehow transform the cruising California beach frog into a prince. The power here is not in making the man out to be a louse. He is never presented as anything more than what he is. The gut punch comes from watching the tragedy of a lonely woman who puts so much hope into what will surely lead to dark disappointment.

Ann is surrounded by a sense of being out of place. As she becomes more and more isolated because of her mother’s emotional dependence, she takes the first bite of the sexual apple. This is not the typical teen deflowering scene. Both the boy and girl are fumbling novices. His attempts to seduce her over the phone are hilariously inept. When, on command, he stumbles to her in his initialed boxer shorts, she grabs him around the neck and holds him with a desperate intensity that communicates yards more about what is really going on. We never see them nude or doing "it" because this is really not about sex as much as about Ann’s attempt to make a profound emotional connection and to affirm in her soul that she is loveable and capable of reaching another person. 

Apparently, this chaste screen version was created at Ms. Portman’s insistence. The script required nudity and simulation. She refused. More power to her for defending her personal standards, and especially because she so powerfully conveyed the deeper meaning of the scene the way it was played. We are certainly not prudish, as our comments about American Pie attest, but we think that Hollywood often cheats to achieve an emotional jolt by stripping down the actors and thereby losing the more powerful meaning of human contact.

As independent as women are capable of being in the modern context of empowerment, disaster is forthcoming when a mother takes her daughter into a world of delusional hope for achievement that is not there and probably not possible. Ultimately, the question in this movie comes down to whether a mother, especially one who would be alone in the world without her daughter, can find the courage, insight, honesty, and integrity to let her daughter become her own woman and live her own life. Possessiveness of the daughter becomes the ultimate vice for Adele. An ironic vice, because Adele's achievement in life came from severing her own traditional, role bound ties.

Of course, with such a slice of life story, the laughs, tears, and internal cringes of empathy are carried by the quality of the acting. Susan Sarandon has a gift for the madcap, fly off in her car, and follow her impulses kind of role. She captures the mania as well as pathos. She does a great job, as we would expect.

We marveled at the awesome maturing talent of Natalie Portman (Professional, Phantom Menace). Her tears come from the depths of her character. Her resentment and anger, though ever present, are filtered through the grudging respect and love she develops for her wacky mother. Her grit, her determination, her compassion, and her rage are powerful and evocative. She made her role alive, believable, and a joy to behold.

Though comparisons are often too easy devices for conveying inexact meaning, we are struck that Ms. Portman has the delicate, translucent, and elegant beauty of Audrey Hepburn. She is thin, even willowy, but never anorexic or enervated. Her face is gorgeous, delicate, refined, and expressive. What a canvas of exquisite dimension for an actress of her caliber and promise! We can’t wait for her to finish College so we can see her in roles other than that of the space queen in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, the only films she has planned for the next three or four years.