The affordable streets they live on reminded me of "The Slums of Beverly Hills," the 1998 movie where jobless Alan Arkin steers his kids into the same school system, but "Anywhere But Here" isn't a ripoff of the earlier movie--it's more as if the mom saw it, and made up her mind to try the same thing. For that matter, it's based on Mona Simpson's 1987 novel, so the inspiration may have traveled the other way.
The mother is Adele August (Susan Sarandon), sexy, wildly optimistic, consumed by her visions. Her daughter Ann (Natalie Portman) is a serious kid, smart and observant, who is tired of her mom's sudden inspirations. I think there's a possibility that Adele is manic, but the movie doesn't go that route, preferring to see her as a dreamer who needs to grow up.
Adele is right and wrong about her plan: wrong to leave the way she does, because going away to college might have provided a saner transition for her daughter. Right that her second husband Ted, Ann's stepfather, "will always be an ice skating instructor," and Ann's fate is not to be "a nothing girl in a nothing factory in a nothing town." Adele waited too long to make her own move and doesn't want Ann to make the same mistake. Well, parents have been living through their children since the dawn of time.
Living in Beverly Hills is a challenge for both of them. Ann gets along fairly well at school, but her mother is insecure behind her brassy facade and afraid to go to the kind of posh holiday party that she moved to California so they could attend. She deceives herself about one-night stands, like a pickup by Dr. Josh Spritzer (Hart Bochner), who is "more than just a dentist. He's writing a screenplay." Ann has seen enough of romance to be wary of it, even though she attracts the attention of a nice kid named Peter (Corbin Allred), who quotes T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets while jogging--always a good sign.
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