Anywhere but Here (1999)
By this point everyone should already know how great an actress Susan Sarandon is—she plays this character with a predictable persistence of showy flagrance. It’s not a bad performance, by any means, but we have seen so many great ones from her; would we even remember any of her halfhearted eccentricities in Anywhere but Here if not for the measured self-discipline of Natalie Portman counterbalancing it? Their mother-daughter relationship in the film is nothing new, but Portman sells her suppressed disgust for her mother’s immaturity with such an awareness for her mother’s maternal failures we see an a completely new autonomous persona from the actress—it’s no surprise she nabbed a Golden Globe nomination for this (her first major award nod). What a shame that her dry and emotionless reading of the stupendously awful Phantom Menace script completely overshadowed her performance in this o
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