POSTHOC RATING:  ***

Alvin Sargent and Wayne Wang’s Anywhere But Here is an all-in-all good movie.  A humorous and touching portrayal of the tangled ups and downs of a mother- daughter relationship and, maybe, in a more modest, subtle fashion, the passion and turmoil underlying all human relationships.  It’s a movie of and about feelings.

One day Adele August (Susan Sarandon) a middle-aged beauty of extraordinary high-spirits and mindless determination escapes in a 1978 Mercedes from the dreary (to her) town of Bay City, Wisconsin, to storm the gates of Beverly Hills.  She is an emotionalist, a 1960s free spirit whose sole compass is her heart.  She’s never stopped being a rebel and never will.  Her shining dream is take her daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) to Hollywood and make her into a movie star. As you may guess, the one thing Adele doesn’t have is an ounce of sense.

Unhappily for them both the last thing Ann wants is to be the latest Pamela Lee Anderson.   She was quite happy in Bay City, thank you very much, with her Aunts and Uncles and grandmother and best friend cousin Benny (Shawn Hatosy) and lesbian best friend Janice (Heather McComb) who bestows upon Ann a sweetly tacky cheesecake snapshot of herself as a keepsake. 

Compared to her mother, Ann is a sensible grownup, though a thoroughly alienated one.  After all, she’s the one who’s supposed to be the high-spirited rebel. But with a mother like Adele, the only way for Ann to rebel is to take on the role of parent.  It’s a clever reverse on the usual generation gap scenario.  As the story progresses, Ann finds herself playing Mom to Adele, much to her mortification.  She yearns for the simplicity and stability she thought she once had (and comes to learn really didn’t have at all). Much as she often simply cannot stand her mother, the love is too strong, and the impact of events is too great for her to go back to what was.  She can’t go home again.

Susan Sarandon is wonderfully explosive as Adele.  She’s like an out-sized con woman who thinks nothing of barging into private house-showings and pretending she can afford the place.  She promises the moon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but retreats to the Travelodge.  Her solution to every crisis is ice cream.  Her heart is smashed repeatedly like delicate china, but she never fails to glue it back together again. Everything she touches turns to offal, except for Ann.  If it wasn’t for her misguided passion for her daughter Adele would be a borderline psychopath, one of those people you gaze at in deep fascination one moment and then flee from the next.   But her heart, misguided as it is, is always in the right place. And so against, your better judgment, you stay with her.  As Ann says, without people like her, the world would only be a flat place. 

Sarandon keeps you with this character like the terrific actress she is.  In her hands, Adele becomes like Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, a whirling storm, a scary, but lovely Force of Nature. She is willful and windy enough to believe her own Cosmo girl hype.  But her faith in her dreams is not quite enough to keep from breaking down when they turn out to be lead.   Unlike Moreau’s Catherine Adele has Ann to care about and keep her rooted to humanity.  It’s her saving grace. Sarandon lets us in on the great fear and insecurity at the heart of this unstoppable dreamer.   She storms the screen like Katherine Hepburn or Joan Crawford did in Mildred Pierce 40-years ago.  Only, with Adele, her storms leave her high and dry. But what she gets is not necessarily worse, only different plus a little bit more.  It’s a gloriously shining performance. Sarandon gracefully makes Adele hilarious, horrifying and deeply poignant.

To play with an actress like Sarandon as a character like Adele is an enormous challenge for any actor young or old but Natalie Portman is more than up to it.  Instead of trying to compete with Sarandon, Portman rightly plays against her, giving Ann both the quality of a wounded child, and a sullen feline, with her soft slim shoulders hunched in despair, her rage at the embarrassment her mother puts her through turned inwards. Where Adele’s dreams lie in living a Martha Stewart lifestyle, Ann’s lie in escape.  Her soft brown eyes brim with hurt, confusion and bewilderment at a world that keeps slipping out from under her feet.  As someone who got moved around a lot when I was young, I was attuned to her every move. Ann has her mother’s stick-to-it-iveness and that Mid-Western sense of orderliness but with the graceful sensibility needed to survive such a tempestuous character.

Director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) wisely stands back from these two actresses.  Though the camera, mounted on a special crane that allows the actors more room to roam, moves a lot, the movie never seems overly-cinematic and rarely becomes Hollywoodish. It doesn’t feel either cramped or cloying. Wang also has veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s  (Ordinary People) perceptive sharp screenplay.  The film avoids being overly slick for the most part, though there’s nothing terribly new going on here (it may recall for you the recent Down and Out in Beverly Hills, in its story of errant parenting in La-La Land). A few scenes don’t work: a strike at the school where Adele teaches is handled perfunctorily and a couple scenes with a compassionate, understanding L.A. cop (!), played by Michael Milhoan, seem a little too cute (it’s hard to imagine any cop having much patience for a hurricane like Adele).  But Anywhere But Here sometimes has the relaxed feeling that many European dramas have: it’s like looking through a window and glimpsing people as they really are.