An unlikely romance in St. Louis
White Palace is a romantic drama about two people who, on paper, should have nothing in common. Max Baron, played by James Spader, is a young, wealthy, recently widowed advertising executive in St. Louis, grieving for his wife and living a careful, upper-middle-class life. Nora Baker, played by Susan Sarandon, is a forty-three-year-old waitress at the White Palace hamburger joint, a divorced mother with a sharp tongue, a complicated past, and no patience for pretence. When Max, drunk and grieving, wanders into the White Palace one night, Nora takes him home, and an affair begins that neither of them expected and neither can easily explain.
Sarandon plays Nora as a woman who has learned to protect herself with humour. She is funny, frank, and sexually confident, but she is also wary. She has been hurt, she has raised a son largely on her own, and she knows what the world thinks of a waitress who dates a rich young widower. Sarandon never lets Nora become a symbol of working-class authenticity or a manic pixie saviour. She is a specific person, with a specific history, and her jokes are often a way of testing whether Max is really listening.
Class, grief, and honesty
Director Luis Mandoki, working from Glenn Savan’s novel, directs White Palace as a serious adult romance, not a fairy tale. The film’s central tension is class: Max’s friends and family are appalled by Nora, not because she is unkind, but because she is older, poorer, and less polished than the women they expect him to date. Nora, in turn, is appalled by their snobbery, and by Max’s occasional embarrassment. Sarandon plays Nora’s pride beautifully. She will not apologise for her job, her age, or her past, and she will not pretend to be someone she is not in order to fit into Max’s world.
The film’s most powerful scenes are its quietest. Nora and Max talk in her kitchen, in his apartment, and in the car, about grief, about sex, about what they want from life. Sarandon and Spader have a tender, believable chemistry, built on listening rather than grand gestures. Spader’s Max is earnest and a little lost; Sarandon’s Nora is grounded and a little scared. When they argue, it feels like a real argument between two people who care about each other, not like a plot device. When they make up, it feels earned.
Nora’s backstory is revealed gradually: a difficult marriage, a son, a life of hard work, and a resilience that she wears lightly. Sarandon does not play Nora as a victim. She plays her as a survivor who has decided to enjoy herself, even if enjoyment comes with risk. Her scenes with her son, and with her friends at the White Palace, show a woman embedded in a community, not isolated by her romance. She has a life, and Max must fit into it, not the other way around.
A brave performance in a divisive film
White Palace divided critics on release. Some praised its honesty and Sarandon’s performance; others found its class politics heavy-handed. Over time, the film has been reassessed as a brave, adult romance, unusual in its willingness to centre a woman in her forties as a sexual and romantic lead. In 1990, that was rare. Hollywood romances typically paired older men with younger women, not the other way around, and White Palace reversed that pattern without making a fuss about it. Nora is older than Max, and the film treats that as a fact, not a problem.
For Sarandon, Nora was a natural follow-up to Annie Savoy. Both women are frank about desire, funny about men, and determined to live on their own terms. But Nora is more vulnerable than Annie. She has less security, less certainty, and more to lose. Sarandon shows that vulnerability without sacrificing Nora’s strength. She cries, she laughs, she gets angry, and she keeps going, and the performance is all the more moving for its lack of vanity.
The film’s ending is bittersweet and honest. Max and Nora do not ride off into a perfect future; they choose each other, knowing the difficulties ahead, and that choice feels like enough. Sarandon plays Nora’s final scenes with a mixture of hope and realism that is characteristic of her best work. She does not promise that love will solve everything. She promises only that it is worth trying.
Why Nora still matters
Nora Baker matters because she is a romantic heroine who looks like a real woman. She works in a burger joint, she has lines on her face, she has a past, and she is desirable not despite those things, but because of them. Sarandon’s performance insists that romance does not belong only to the young, the rich, or the flawless. It belongs to anyone brave enough to be honest about what they want.
For viewers today, White Palace is a reminder of a time when Hollywood made romantic dramas for adults, with dialogue, conflict, and moral complexity. Sarandon is the film’s anchor, and Nora is one of her most underrated creations: funny, proud, tender, and entirely herself. She orders what she wants, says what she thinks, and refuses to be embarrassed about either. That, in the end, is why Max falls for her, and why audiences do too.
On rewatching, Nora’s humour stands out as her armour and her gift. Sarandon delivers jokes that could sound bitter in other hands, but in hers they sound like survival: a way of staying honest in a world that often asks women to be smaller, quieter, and more grateful than they feel. That honesty is what Max recognises, and it is what makes their romance feel not just unlikely, but necessary.