White Palace

Plot synopsis:
27-year-old St. Louis advertising executive, Max Baron (James Spader), has completely shut himself off from the world in the two years since the auto accident that killed his wife Janey (Maria Pitillo). On the way to his friend's bachelor party, Neil (Jason Alexander), Max picks up 50 burgers from a diner called White Palace. At the party, he discovers that the order is six burgers short and, to the ridicule of his friends, returns to the restaurant to complain. In a moment that defines his initial character, Max declares, "It's the principle." He is roundly mocked by his cohorts.
At the White Palace diner, after a heated exchange occurs between Max and a 43-year-old waitress, Nora Baker (Susan Sarandon), she exasperatedly refunds him. Max returns to the party but leaves upset and heads to a bar, where he runs into Nora. Drunk, she flirts with him, but he pushes her advances away and starts to leave. She senses he's upset, asks why, and discovers his wife died in a car crash. She discloses that she lost her young son to leukemia. The 'connection' prevents him from leaving. They have a few drinks and eventually he gives her a lift home to East St. Louis, but drunkenly crashes his car into her mailbox. She invites him to spend the night at her house, with the couch as his bed. Max starts dreaming about his late wife, then wakes up to find Nora performing fellatio on him. They end up having passionate sex.
After visiting his wife's grave on the second anniversary of her death, Max returns to White Palace to watch a busy Nora from a distance. He visits her at home with the pretext of replacing the broken mailbox, but instead they begin a relationship. Max becomes more relaxed and cheerful around Nora and at his work, but remains reluctant to reveal their relationship to his family and friends. At one point, he gets frustrated that all he and Nora do are sit and watch TV in her house. She firmly reminds him of their differences in age and social backgrounds.
Nora is angry after Max has lied to her about his friend Neil's wedding and that he didn't take her. They argue about how Max keeps their relationship a secret and that he is probably ashamed of being seen with her. Nora's sister, Judy (Eileen Brennan), meets Max the following day and explains to him, in Nora's absence, how they were abandoned as children and that she left a young Nora to fend for herself. Judy also explains that Nora's son drowned.
While at the supermarket with Nora, Max leaves her at the counter and runs into Neil's wife, Rachel (Rachel Chagall), who invites him and his "mystery woman" to Thanksgiving. At Max's apartment, Nora hears a message on his answering machine inviting them to the Horowitz's for Thanksgiving. Nora brings up the subject to an initially hesitant Max; however, they resolve to attend as a couple. At the Thanksgiving dinner with Neil, Rachel, Mrs. Baron (Renee Taylor), Max's friends, and the Horowitz extended family make Nora uncomfortable. Following an argument between Nora and Neil's father, she walks out, Max and his mother following. After the dinner, Nora and Max argue in her house over what had happened and she tells him to leave.
Some time later, Max finds Nora's house empty and a note explaining to him that she left and that he shouldn't come looking for her. He visits White Palace and is informed that Nora quit. He goes to a brunch with friends and meets Heidi Solomon (Kim Myers), but cannot stop thinking about Nora. He then realizes that everyone around him seem stuck-up with their "perfect" upper-middle class lives. He travels to New York to find Judy and is informed that Nora is waitressing in a restaurant. Max finds Nora there and confesses his love to her, revealing that he quit his job and moved to New York to be with her. They reunite, kissing tenderly as patrons of the restaurant look on. Max playfully clears the table of its contents and lays a laughing Nora down on it, climbing on top of her and passionately kissing her, while the whole restaurant cheers and applauds.

Tags: paranormal, romantic

Review:
White palace has a great sexual dynamic, clearly Susan Sarandon's character (Nora Baker) is a sexually charged self confident woman who is at least 10 years or so older than James Spader's character (Max Baron).
This movie shows how deep attraction and passion can change people's lives (perhaps for the better) and overcome class/personality and age differences.The first and perhaps most noticeable aspect is one of the hottest and more believable seduction scenes in a movie, where Nora shows a raw animal passion for Max rarely shown in movies (and when it is is shown in an unfavorable light, e.g. Single White Female).
Susan Sarandon pulls off this challenging scene with great passion AND dignity.The May/December romance with the older lady is shown in a healthy light (not like say The Graduate).But more important than the age dynamic, is the deep attraction between Nora and Max, which goes strongly across traditional cultural differences.
This movie has a much more interesting love story than say "Pretty Woman"..
The loss and love Spader communicates with just his eyes is a sight to behold and Sarandon projects a dichotomy of neediness and strength.This movie contains one of the best endings in movie history, right up there with Green Card.
If anyone can carry off a believable and appealing older woman/younger man romance to a mass audience, it's Susan Sarandon.
It is just a simple tale of a younger rich man who shacks up with an older much poorer, working class woman who works at a hamburger joint called White Palace.
Susan Sarandon picks up a drunk James Spader in a bar and takes him home for a night of sweet lovin'.
Like it said on the poster of this movie: "The story of a younger man and a bolder woman.".
The story is about a young man ( Yuppie)who falls in love with a woman who is 15 years his senior.
A perfectly happy end.The reason why I watched this movie was because I'm truly one of the biggest Susan Sarandon fans.
She shines absolutely beautiful in this movie.And James Spader has performed one of his bests roles ever.
I bet you do"and Nora answers: "And I bet you don't" You must see the look on Sherri's faceI think it's a great movie because normally hollywood is afraid of a love story about a young man and an older woman.There should be more of those movies because some people think it's strange when a older woman has a love relation with a much younger man.
Sarandon is very good; she is a "down-at-heel" waitress, almost twenty years older than the character portrayed by Spader.
Spader's background is respectable, white-collar but bored, he meets Sarandon after missing his deceased wife.Films like this are sometimes underrated.
Life doesn't always work out how we want, "perfect couples" aren't necessarily happy, and the Spader character was actually quite good, not being the negative insensitive character here.
Truth to tell I only watched this movie recently because I consider Susan Sarandon one of our finest actors.
Everyone is writing here about excellent acting of Susan Sarandon here, I agree, but I want to say about James Spader.
In this movie his performing is brilliant, he looks very convincingly in the role of young Jewish guy, white-collar worker, who is trying to cope with the loss of his beloved wife.
I regret that young James Spader hadn't been filmed enough by really good directors and in the pairings with really high-class actresses, like here, in "White palace".
James spader's night after rejection of her rings true, and for most people it would end there....but he goes on and they really learn off each other...maybe as i have found in real life it would end, but i think that love is about two people coming together having contact being together loving and learning from each other.So may people that i see staying together in so called sensible compatible marriages don't have what you see these two having together for however long........
"White Palace" is one of my favorite movies, and I am amazed at the negative comments about Susan Sarandon's armpits.
"White Palace" is a very moving and sexually energetic movie that shows you can be happy in your own way.
After a raucous bachelor party, he goes to a bar on the wrong side of town, and there he meets Nora(Susan Sarandon), a worker at White Palace, who refunded Max earlier, asks him what he's doing at this place.
Susan Sarandon and James Spader are excellent actors, and their performances *almost* save it from the source material.Almost.
I would have a hard time believing that ANY self respecting guy would put up with being treated like Sarandon's character treats Spader's.
We're clearly expected to think that Spader's character has come down to Earth and recognized what's really important, but the only thing the movie proves is that (maybe) he's a masochist in search of a sadist.
If you removed Sarandon's character's difference in age, coarse language, and casual racism, you'd still have someone I wouldn't want to be in the room with: I'd have a difficult time believing that Spader would tolerate her character if if she were a hot 19 year old.
It's creepy there, and it's creepy here.Every aspect of this film is based on seeing Sarandon's character's world as preferable to Spader's, and it absolutely is not...not because of disrespect to older women, poor women, or unrefined women, but because she's simply irritating.
The fact that there is a 20 year disparity to Entrapment's 40 says more about Hollywood's tolerance of old men than it does about its condescension towards older women: this movie screws up so badly that in some scenes the shallow rich people are considerably more sympathetic than the "earthy" heroine.I suppose that middle aged women are every bit as entitled to wish fulfillment as middle aged men, but creepy is creepy.
In this movie, the powerful Susan Sarandon plays a waitress at this cheesy little hamburger joint and gets hooked up with James Spader, a clueless rich guy who is controlled by the combination of his weak will and his overbearing parents.
But who really cares about any of this?The real reason to see this movie is that, while sleeping next to Spader, Sarandon wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to seduce him.
Yes she does.I must say that since watching this movie at its original release, I have had a steady stream of impure thoughts about Susan Sarandon.
At its core is the relationship of a young man (Max, played by Spader) of high social standing with a poor, much older woman (Nora, played by Sarandon).
But problems arise for them, because of the social and age differences, which are the main twists in the romance.The White Palace is a basically a simple love story, with above average acting (Sarandon and Spader both have their high and low points) and moderately interesting characters.
Just a lovely, believable story of boy-girl love transcending class.Good production; crisp writing; good direction and actors who can follow that direction, and then some.The only remonstrance I have is offset by the simplicity of the straight-up story, as it stands: The basic scenario is pretty simple, and I don't consider it a "spoiler" to outline it here: Professional man suffering from personal love-loss meets working class gal 16(?) years his senior.
They start an affair based on their shared losses despite their differences.These are two good performances from great actors of interesting damaged people.
This has all of that.I won't go saying that this is a fantastic film, it's not going to be on the top 250 list with Shawshank, but what it does attempt to do it does very well, tell a compelling story about two lonely people in different stages of life from two different socioeconomic levels finding each other first for a physical relationship and over time that relationship deepens into something quite beautiful.Spader is a white collar ad exec who seemingly has everything a 27 year old would want, except he lost his wife two years prior and is still quite depressed and mourning her loss.
His friends want to see him find someone new, but it doesn't seem to work for him as he just isn't receptive to the women he is paired with.He find Susan Sarandon in a bar, she's drinking and they start off awkwardly but there is a palatable connection that these two actors have that is unmistakable.
A quite sexy (in my opinion) love scene occurs and in the next morning while Spader is trying his best to be a gentleman but still get out of her home after what he believes is a one night stand there is something there that these two wounded people connect on.The thing that I love about this movie is it's honesty.
It's the theme of social expectations and the burdens they cause (rightfully or not) and the impact they can have on a relationship.It really is a shame that films like this just don't get produced any longer as it's nice to see good actors bring interesting characters to life in a very well produced slice of life film..
So when an acquaintance--really, a friend of a friend of mine living in the dorms--one night heard me glow over that movie, he scoffed at that and said that it wasn't as good as White Palace, which had just come out recently, in terms of the love scenes and scenarios involved.That stuck with me for a long time, LONG past my infatuation with Miss Roberts, and when I would years later, read another(sadly,I believe the last)novel from Glenn Savan, the author of the book for which White palace was adapted, I was so impressed with it that I decided that if I had a chance to catch White Palace, I would.Just recently, I ran across a copy at the local Video store, and while I probably SHOULD'VE bought it(it was going VERY cheap), I instead rented it and finally checked it out.
While I cannot say I was overly impressed with the WHOLE package of the movie, I WAS taken by the chemistry between James Spader(as a numbed, still-grieving widower architect) and Susan Sarandon(as a Burger joint waitress/cashier whose blythe spirit veils an unhappy past of her own)and found the interpersonal dynamic of the two characters interesting.
I cannot help but feel that there may've been layers to the novel and story that were truncated(and thus shorting potentially interesting story buttresses such as Jason Alexander as Spader's longtime and newly married pal and the keen, palmist sister of Sarandon's played by the late Eileen Brennan)in order to focus in on the meet, date, escalation, conflict and resolution of the romance/relationship between Max(Spader) and Nora(Sarandon).Overall, an appealing, sexy story that might lack the "zazz" of a Pretty Woman or Ghost(the two biggies of calendar year 1990), but a very worthy--if not superior--offering in regards to a romance movie.
I feel like if I ever spoke to that gentleman again, I'd say that while White Palace ISN'T quite everything I might've wanted to see when I was eighteen, it was a much better "grown-up" movie.
(Sarandon so often seems to play that kind of a self-righteous character.)  Spader was compelling in this film--at least until the last ridiculous scene.
There is one sequence, when Spader and Sarandon visit his "intellectual", upper-class friends, where the movie produces genuine tension and discomfort, just like it's supposed to.
I know I don't watch movies because of people's looks but if it wasn't for Spader I'd have never seen this one...
Well, let me just get this out of the way -- I sure as hell hope I can look half as great at "40-something" as Susan does in this film!
Mostly a feel good but definitely not just fluff -- wondered if I would find those two believable as a couple and ended up thinking they were a great match...
Oh my goodness, I wanna make love to Susan Sarandon!.
Good romance and Spader and Sarandon do have a certain chemistry on-screen.
I will be frank: if Susan Sarandon had not been in this movie, I would not have watched.
First of all, because Susan Sarandon is so unattractive in this film (yes, I know she's supposed to be unattractive) I had no rooting interest in seeing these two characters get together.
The bumpy progress of their affair plays convincingly, largely due to the sensitive, nuanced performance of Susan Sarandon, who articulates her character's complexities through body language and facial expression (watch those eyes at all times).
When I first saw this film, I was closer to Max's twenty-seven than to Nora's forty-three, and I understood the characters in a different way than I did yesterday, when Nora is now a young woman to me.
Etc. As different as day and night and against all odds, Spader and Sarandon fall in love in "White Palace", a sort of misguided upside-down and improbable Cinderella story.
Sarandon and Spader are good as usual and the film is artistically and technically up to snuff.
There is a huge hump to get over in this movie, suspending disbelief at the relationship between Max and Nora.
The problem is not just them coming from such different social backgrounds; it is she is such an unlikeable character.The prolonged soft-porn scenes early in the movie made me squirm.
Please get on with the movie." I turned away until these scenes were over.When you meet Max's mother, his shallow old girlfriends and friends you begin to see why Nora's shoot-from-the-lip directness could have some appeal (but certainly not enough for his obsessive sexual attraction.) Perhaps pity has some part of the appeal but again nothing to explain the obsession.Spader is always a treat to watch and that applies to this film as well, even though he grossed me out with the sex scenes..
Sarandon's character is so rough, crude and repulsive (the older part didn't bother me) and it was embarrassing to watch too-fancy-and-fluffy James Spader gaze longingly at her and ache for her.
This movie has some very nice scenes in it, especially the early ones between Spader & Sarandon, but by the second half it dithers away its potential with sitcom scenes of stereotypical jewish characters (the mother especially) that are embarrassing and entirely gratuitous.
This is a straightforward and touching film, and a treat for anyone who enjoys watching actors - especially either of these two - playing small scale scenes recognisable from every day life.
Well aside from the obvious point that Susan Sarandon (Nora,) looks radiant most of the time, and probably never looked better on film, Spader's character (Max,) is not quite as preppy as he appears, and has more in common with Nora than first meets the eye.
It has some inspired comic touches - "the sandwich" springs to mind - a solid chemistry between the two stars, and some touching pieces of observation such as when Max tenderly explores Nora's belongings reminiscently of Garbo in Queen Christina.If you fancy a touching love story, well acted, with stand back and don't get in the way direction, and with gentle undercurrents of social commentary, then The White Palace is worth a shot.
I know everyone has a right to their opinion but this movie is so little known I truly hope at least one person reads some POSITVE reviews on here and gives it a shot.I do NOT think Sarandon looked unattractive here as people have said but if she did, it really doesn't matter because the focus of the story has little to do with physical attractiveness.
While I don't believe the end result for a second, this film will do whatever it takes to make us believe the relationship between 44 year old Nora Baker and 27 year old Max Baron can work.
It's the idea of who and what they are outside the personal relationship.Susan Sarandon's performance as the waitress is a winner because she shows her as fearless, dynamic, and flawed..but she doesn't ask for pity and accepts that life doesn't always deal everyone a great hand.
It's often 3 things that make a movie: a story, interesting characters, and competent actors.
Well, actually, one out of three is bad.The one thing this movie has going for it is good acting.
There are some good performances (though not much screen time) by supporting actors -- Jason Alexander, Kathy Bates, and Eileen Brennan (perhaps the best characterization in the film).
The performances by Susan Sarandon and James Spader were top-rate which made their respective characters quite believable.
I really like the fact Susan Sarandon and James Spader teamed up together because they did make a good fine couple.
Now the reason why I gave this movie a 7/10 because, I didn't like how Sarandon's character Nora, was being a complete smart *** and just a slob.
I would rather see the personality more calmer and more smarter, Sarandon should've been better off if she did act that way for the film!Apart from that complaint, it was an alright movie!.
There are many occasions when I feel that I've been watching a different movie from the majority of people who submit a review to IMDb so it's very pleasant to be able to endorse the other positive opinions for this really fine film.
James Spader is also spot on as the twenty-seven year old yuppie widower who falls genuinely in love with Sarandon's forty-three year old waitress at the eponymous White Palace(clearly based on the White Castle hamburger chain).
I really, really, really, liked this movie and watch it every couple of months.
James Spader is great (and surprisingly sexy) in this movie.
Susan Sarandon plays just the right character.
The story is actually believable - that this young man could fall for an older woman.
I love James Spader - that's why I sat through this movie - not once (years ago), but twice (very recently).