Susan Sarandon, the 52-year-old Oscar winner who has rewritten the book on the later careers of star actresses in American movies, comes up with one more brilliant, moving portrayal in her latest film, Wayne Wang’s “Anywhere But Here.” She plays flirty, funny and crazily adventurous Adele August, a single mother who drives cross-country to Los Angeles with her much more sensible teenage daughter (Natalie Portman). Sarandon, a mother of three — two with her longtime partner, actor-director Tim Robbins — catches Adele with enormous wit and sympathy. Those are qualities she also radiated in an interview at the Toronto Film Festival.
Q. Adele August is a great part for you.
A. I’m always drawn to ordinary people who do extraordinary things within the framework of their lives. Think of it, the amount of denial that this woman needs to be able to leave Wisconsin with no money, no job, driven by this ferocious wish for her daughter to have more than she had. And the challenge of it, of course, is that she’s so unsympathetic, so consistently insensitive and self-indulgent. And so needy. And the only dream she has, she then passes on to her daughter.
Q. Actually, I found Adele obnoxious but charming.
A. Well, this is the aspect of (Adele) that I hoped to bring back to my mothering. Because — especially if you’re serious about being a parent — the first thing that happens is that you lose who you are and you go into some kind of parenting trance, probably replicating your parents. You lose who you are. And you lose a sense of fun. And you lose the wonder. And if there’s one thing that Adele has that I really love about her it’s this sense of wonder and enjoying life.
Q. The reason I’m sympathetic to Adele is that I’ve seen how hard it is for a single mother like that. It’s almost heroic.
A. It’s totally heroic. Incredibly heroic. And I think that’s one of the things that drew me to the piece. I think that’s true of a lot of these women: waitresses and single moms and suburban moms. When people say to me: “Why are you playing mothers?” I feel that it’s an incredibly fertile area that hasn’t been touched.
Q. Perhaps because mothers were heavily sentimentalized in our movies for so long.
A. One-dimensional. It’s an American thing, because you see in Italian films and French films, they’ve always allowed a much richer approach to women who happen to have children.
Q. Your years after “Bull Durham” (1988) have been the richest part of your career. Why are you able to beat the preconceptions about star actresses past 40?
A. I have no idea. I’ve taken off a year and a half or two years every time I had a child. You can’t pull out from the business that way and still come back. I’ve just been lucky and I’ve followed my heart and I’ve had people — I don’t know!
Q. Did you follow your heart more often after “Bull Durham?”
A. No, always. I think that what was lucky for me was that, in the beginning, I didn’t have a lot of attention focused on me. I wasn’t going up for really incredible parts. So I could spend a lot of time trying to figure out who I was, trying to identify my strengths. And so, by the time I could step up to bat and get a part that was very complicated, I was ready. . . . I was always overqualified for everything I was doing when I was younger.
Q. Smarter?
A. Yeah! But it gave me the opportunity to have a gestation period that really got me ready. I saw myself as a character actor. I never studied acting. And every job that I took on — the complete hippie that I am — was a way to really learn about myself. . . . And what it’s taught me is how to surrender. How to really isolate with each project, what I want to get out of it that’s in the moment, that’s within my reach. And then to let go of it.
