“White Palace” wants you to believe it’s a daring May-December love story. What it really is, though, is the cinematic equivalent of finding a cigarette butt floating in your glass of merlot. It tries to be sexy, soulful, and socially edgy, but ends up being a midlife crisis wrapped in cigarette smoke and mashed potatoes.
Here’s the setup: James Spader plays Max, a buttoned-up, neurotic, recently widowed advertising executive who looks like he ironed his soul along with his shirt collars. Enter Susan Sarandon as Nora, a brassy, working-class waitress with a raspy voice, a bad dye job, and the libido of a freight train. She seduces him over a sack of White Castle sliders, and somehow this is supposed to be erotic. It’s not. It’s greasy, like the griddle they met on.
Their chemistry is less “opposites attract” and more “one of us is clearly emotionally damaged.” And the film tries really hard to convince us that this is a story about love transcending class barriers. But mostly it’s just about a sad yuppie sleeping with a woman who chain-smokes Virginia Slims and keeps her furniture upholstered in regret.
Susan Sarandon is giving it her all. God bless her. She’s earthy, raw, and fully committed to the role. But the script gives her nothing but clichés to work with. She’s the free-spirited older woman who teaches the uptight younger man how to live, love, and loosen his tie. She might as well have been named “Plot Device Nora.”
James Spader, meanwhile, spends the entire film looking like he’s either deeply constipated or wondering how his agent tricked him into doing this. This is before he embraced the sleazeball roles that actually fit him like a velvet glove. Here, he’s supposed to be our everyman, but mostly he comes off like a walking Wall Street migraine.
The sex scenes? Awkward. Not in a cute way. In a “Why is this happening under fluorescent lighting?” kind of way. There’s a particular scene where she pulls him into bed with the urgency of someone trying to escape a house fire. It’s shot like a tampon commercial directed by a pervert. Nothing sizzles. Everything just kind of… sticks.
The supporting cast exists solely to furrow their brows and say things like “She’s not like us,” in case the metaphor about class differences wasn’t already beating you over the head with a tire iron. The film wants to say something important about love defying societal expectations, but it ends up saying, “Look, an older woman can still land a pretty boy if he’s broken enough.”
And don’t even get me started on the ending — a mad dash through a train station that feels like it wandered in from a different, better movie. It’s meant to be triumphant, but mostly it feels like both characters are running from the script. You can practically see Sarandon yelling, “Just roll credits! I’m tired!”
If this movie were a meal, it’d be cold meatloaf and a half-finished bottle of Yellow Tail, eaten alone at a Formica table while the cat judges you.
The only thing this film proves is that loneliness can override taste, and Hollywood will greenlight anything if you pitch it with the words “taboo” and “erotic.” “White Palace” is neither. It’s a slow-motion train wreck of desperation, repressed grief, and poorly lit foreplay.
Skip it. Or better yet, go eat at a real White Castle. At least there, the regret comes cheaper and with fewer emotional monologues.
