Analyzing Janet Fitch's 'White Oleander'

glrWhite Oleander

White Oleander is the harrowing story of Astrid Magnussen, who finds herself in foster care after her relentless mother, is imprisoned for murder. It’s a novel written by Janet Fitch, which then had a film adaptation in 2002 directed by Peter Kosminsky. The screenplay of this beautiful story leaves the audience without experiencing the full emotional impact. New elements were added and major components were left out for the film composition to be less complex, thus easier to sympathize with. For this to be a reality Kosminsky disintegrates the novel by altering its theme, character development, and the setting.

To begin, the film interpretation of the story captures the theme of motherhood and self discovery, yet it succumbs

Kosminsky never displays this scene, he compensates by adding a theatrically emotional bit of Astrid and Ingrid’s last encounter at Ingrid’s court hearing, the audience feels the mother becomes a better person when Astrid says “she let me go” tearfully with a close up camera shot to the background disheartening, plaintive music. The film doesn't get any closer to displaying the unbreakable, yet fragile relationship between the two. Whereas in the book, Fitch further analyzes the tangible mother, the physical child-bearer contrasted to the incorporeal blood mother. Astrid angrily cries reading a letter from her mother, “So now I was supposed to feel pity for you and those other women who’d lost their own children during a holdup, a murder, a fiesta of greed?” (349). Fitch refuses to let Astrid forgive Ingrid so easily; the reader goes through the journey with Astrid, from admiring to rebelling against her mother, and finally forgiving. Astrid’s life is traumatic at every turn and event, giving her

A country perceived by the world to be filled with hedonism in the 1990’s. The course of the story is set in California; the change in the setting is significant in the end to represent the world’s glamorized view of the country contrasted to the actual reality of the state. A state that consists of daughters and mothers with struggles that are overlooked, and hedonism is an utter fantasy perceived by the world. After Astrid’s scuffle with life, she compares America to Berlin, a land of horrors, “Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the Earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.” (433) On the other hand, the ending of the movie is set in New York, so none of Fitch’s ideas are included, the viewer watches scenes of a lovely New York loft turned into a workshop, accompanied with cheery instrumental music, where she happily lives with her boyfriend. Moreover, Berlin is the ideal place to end White Oleander. The city is home of monstrosity and struggle, complete parallel to Astrid’s character, but both in the end still stand confidently. Astrid’s beautiful metaphor says it all, “Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it.” (436) The whole idea of differentiating the