Astrid's best foster experience is with Claire (Zellweger), whose performance is the most convincing in the movie. She plays a onetime horror star, married to a director who is usually absent, and we believe the scenes she has with Astrid because they come from need and honesty.
They also inspire the best scenes between Astrid and her mother; Pfeiffer finds just the right note between jealousy and perception when, on visiting day at the prison, she observes, "You dress like her now." Later she tells her daughter, "I'd like to meet her." "Why?" "Because you don't want me to." And later: "How can you stand to live with poor Claire? I would rather see you in the worst kind of foster home than to live with that woman." The scenes involving Claire most clearly inspire Astrid's developing ideas about her mother.
The third foster experience, with Svetlana Efremova playing the Russian jumble-sale woman, offers a glimpse of the economy's underbelly but is too choppy and perfunctory to engage us: It feels like it was filmed to add color and then chopped to reduce the running time. Its only influence on Astrid is to change her wardrobe and hair color, in what feels more like a stunt than a character development.
Pfeiffer's role is the most difficult in the movie because she has to compress her revelations and emotions into the brief visits of her increasingly dubious daughter. Astrid, who once idealized her mother, now blames her for the loss of happiness with Claire. But even the movie's big emotional payoff at the end loses something because, after all, Ingrid did murder Barry, and so what is presented as a sacrifice on behalf of her daughter could also be described as simply doing the right thing.
"White Oleander" is based on a novel by Janet Fitch, recommended by Oprah's Book Club, unread by me. I gather it includes still more colorful foster home episodes. Amy Aquino plays Miss Martinez, the social worker who drives Astrid from one foster adventure to the next. She feels like this movie's version of Michael Anthony, the man who introduced each episode of "The Millionaire." You can imagine her on the TV series, shipping the heroine to a different foster home every week.
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