Call it "Daughter Knows Best". In fact, call it anything you want except a "chick flick." Anywhere But Here only gets gooey in its closing moments, and by then it has earned the right to sap and tears. Wayne Wang, the crafty director behind Smoke and its experimental (if largely unsuccessful) twin Blue in the Face, has a knack for straining the schmaltz from the emotion, and for the second time in his filmmaking career (after The Joy Luck Club), he proves that the truths behind mother-daughter conflict know no gender biases.

Adele (Susan Sarandon) uproots her only child, Ann (Natalie Portman), from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, in pursuit of little except a radical change in scenery. There is a wispy notion that Adele will find work as a teacher while Ann auditions for movies and TV shows, but Adele is too flighty to handle one child, let alone a class of twenty or thirty; Ann has no burning desire to act.

Ann, to be expected, is the figurative parent, the sensible, responsible, weary one in relation to troubled, possessive Adele. The film is told from Ann's perspective (to that end, she narrates it), so we're frustrated by the condescending manner in which figures of authority treat Ann when mother and daughter are together. Alvin Sargent's adaptation of Mona Simpson's 1987 novel impressed me where Ann is concerned: her wisdom and command of logic never become precious or unreasonably mature.

This may actually be the uncomplicatedly beautiful Natalie Portman's dramatic gifts at work and not the screenplay. George Lucas shouldn't have cast her in The Phantom Menace--who's going to notice a genuine apple in a bowl of wax fruit? Portman is far too subtle an actress for effects movies (and their flipside, cheap teen comedies--thankfully, she has avoided those); Jar Jar Binks upstages her while Sarandon, brilliantly pompous, does not--Portman's face becomes a dictionary of feeling when she can make genuine eye contact with a co-star.

There are novelties in Wang's film, such as the anti-Clueless portrayal of a Beverly Hills high school: the rich students embrace the innately likeable Ann despite potential class conflict. When Ann decides she will lose her virginity (or something like that), she feigns confidence by domineering the consummation, and the scene turns into a lovely aria about a girl who just needs some kind of release.

Los Angeles has been photographed in Anywhere But Here (by Roger Deakins) to look parched and empty, a post-Riots city in decay. This perhaps reflects middle-aged Adele's world more than Ann's: a dead-end, the dream factory gutted. Time to grow up. The film risked running out of steam after its introductory scenes, at least from a studio's outlook, because the point--rather, the theme of destructive symbiosis--is pretty much laid bare by the insistent combination of these wasteland images and scornful dialogue between Ann and Adele in act one.

In order to keep the train moving, grand tragedies that distract from, rather than stem from, the central conflict, such as a death in the family (shades of Sargent's superior Ordinary People), are clumsily sandwiched into the story, giving it a movie of the week flavour (Wang's weakness has always been a tendency towards the episodic). Said cataclysms rarely struck me as mawkish, mind you, but at every turn, Anywhere But Here narrowly dodges becoming an Oprah movie. Thora Birch, another terrific young actress, appears unbilled.

Fox's Anywhere But Here DVD contains one of their very best video transfers. Letterboxed at 2.35:1 and enhanced for widescreen sets, the picture is smooth and clear, with deep blacks and a limitless palette of warm tones. Edge enhancement and compression artifacts are non-existent. The sound is Dolby Digital 5.0, meaning it doesn't include a dedicated LFE channel; from the lack of surround activity as well, I would have guessed DD 3.0. The song-track has life, with strong stereo separation, and dialogue is always audible. A 5-minute featurette plus the original theatrical trailer (notable for a few shots that didn't make it into the final cut) are the disc's meagre extras. -Bill Chambers