Starr, the former stripper, seems less like a person than a caricature, although the director, Peter Kosminsky, has a good eye for detail and shows how her family takes a jaundiced view of her born-again grandstanding.

She kills him, observing to her daughter, 'He made love to me and then said I had to leave because he had a date.' When you hardly know someone and that's how he treats you, he's not worth serving 35 years to life.Īstrid then moves on to the series of foster homes, each one so colorful it could be like the adventure of a Dickens character the Russian is unmistakably a descendent of Fagin, and surely only in a Hollywood fantasy could any of these women qualify as foster mothers. Then makes the mistake of letting Barry ( Billy Connolly) into her life (although so fleeting is his role he is barely allowed into the movie). 'No one had ever seen anyone more beautiful than my mother,' Astrid tells us, but there are ominous hints that Ingrid is not an ideal mother, as when she skips Parents Night because 'what can they tell me about you that I don't already know?' Ingrid doesn't date. (The movie is all too appropriately rated PG-13 I suspect full justice cannot be done to this material short of an R.) Astrid is the daughter of Ingrid (Pfeiffer), an artist and free spirit who sits on the roof so the desert winds can find her. It's an awesome performance but would benefit from depth and darkness that the movie shies away from.

The movie is narrated by Astrid Magnussen, played by Lohman in several different years and weathers of her life. I don't hold the beauty of the actresses against them, but I wish the movie had not been so pleased with the way the sunlight comes streaming through their long blond hair and falls on their flawless skin and little white summer dresses. Aren't there any foster mothers who are old, tired, a little mean and doing it for the money? The performances are often touching and deserve a better screenplay. Then you get a Russian capitalist who dresses like a gypsy, uses her foster kids as dumpster-divers, and runs a stall at the Venice Beach flea market. Then you get an actress who lives in a sun-drenched beach house in Malibu and becomes her best friend. When you are a teenage girl and your mother is jailed for murder and you are shipped to a series of foster homes, isn't it a little unlikely that each home would play like an entertaining episode of a miniseries? First you get a sexy foster mom who was 'an alcoholic, a cokehead and dancing topless-and then I was saved by Jesus,' although she still dresses like an off-duty stripper. The story is determined to be colorful and melodramatic, like a soap opera where the characters suffer in ways that look intriguing.

White oleander novel