Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

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FRIED GREEN TOMATOES

Reviewed by Heather Picker

Directed by Jon Avnet. Written by Fannie Flagg, Carol Sobieski, and Jon Avnet. Starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker, Kathy Bates, and Jessica Tandy. 1991, 137 minutes, originally rated PG-13; the unrated extended cut is equivalent to PG-13.

Warning!: Hey kids, this is still pretty much what I wrote when I was 16 and it sucks tremendously! Will be re-written eventually.

Adapted from Fannie Flagg's Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, Fried Green Tomatoes is an old-fashioned film, so old-fashioned, in fact, that director Jon Avnet pulled a Spielberg (see The Color Purple) and done shoved his heroines in the closet. In Flagg's fast, funny book, it was no secret that Huck Finn-ish (hee, Finnish) tomboy Idgie Threadgoode, played here by Mary Stuart Masterson, was a big ol' lesbian who loved her some Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker). Ruth loved her back, and though the girls in the novel never bust open the closet door singing "I Kissed a Girl," their relationship is acknowledged by those around them, including Idgie's accepting parents.

Here, they're just really, really, really good friends who work together and live together and raise a child together and share lots of meaningful glances (italicized because they're so very meaningful). Sometimes they even get drunk and let the love that dare not speak its name almost get away from them, before the script, by Flagg and Avnet (with help from Carol Sobieski, who Avnet says originally conceived the film as a musical) reigns it all back in. I'd complain, but why? It's lame that they threw a bland but inoffensive blanket over the subject matter, making the characters a little more ambiguous than Ace and Gary, but scenes like Ruth and Idgie's playful, sensuous food fight would leave only the most oblivious viewer thinking they're just knitting buddies.

As it is, Fried Green Tomatoes is solid entertainment, an old-fashioned story told by talented artists with a visible love for their work. And there's more to it than the stuff with the non-lesbian lesbians: Jessica Tandy plays Ninny Threadgoode, an elderly retirement home resident who befriends Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), a middle-aged woman unsatisfied with her life. Happy to have someone to talk to, Ninny shares stories about Idgie and Ruth that inspire Evelyn to change her life.

We meet Idgie when she's a child, in awe of her older brother, Buddy (Chris O'Donnell), who is trying to romance Ruth. She tags along as they go for a walk and an oncoming train kills Buddy when a gentlemanly act of hat retrieval (yeah, I just wanted an excuse to type "hat retrieval") leaves him caught on the tracks. A stricken Idgie withdraws from life and stays that way until her late teens, when her concerned mother calls on Ruth one summer to intervene. They slowly form a friendship that is fueled by their differences (Idgie is wild, Ruth reserved; Idgie is vulgar, Ruth is prim; Idgie likes nü-metal and Ruth prefers the musical stylings of Britney Spears…except that last part is a lie since it's all set in the 1920s and I like to make stuff up) and they totally have crushes on each other but since we were 70-something years away from Ellen, Ruth becomes engaged to a bad-ass motherfucker (though we don’t know that until later) named Frank Bennett.

Idgie goes back into self-imposed exile but can't stay away: a few years later she goes to see Ruth and sets into motion a chain of events that brings a newly single Ruth back to Whistle Stop, where she lives with Idgie in a domestic bliss of sorts, and runs a café. As Evelyn, buoyed by her friendship with Ninny and inspired by Idgie and Ruth, grows triumphantly self-confident, the focus of the Idgie/Ruth story shifts to the mysterious disappearance of bad-ass motherfucker Frank Bennett in the 1930s.

That part of the plot is stupid, so I'll stop lazily rehashing the story and get to the complaining. Though it has an abundance of sweet and heartwarming content, Fried Green Tomatoes relies too heavily on melodrama. Thankfully, Avnet shows some -- some -- restraint in his tear-jerking tendencies when the Big Weepy Moment finally arrives, but the parallels between Evelyn's life and the Whistle Stop events that inspire her are forced, and the screenwriters fudge with the book's timeline in ways that may jar readers. Most troubling and offensive of all is the film's implication that Ninny and Idgie are the same person. It is firmly established in the book that they aren't, and that it's even hinted at in the movie is ridiculously cloying.

The four actresses are all first-rate: Bates has the simplest role but adds all sorts of emotional layers to Evelyn; Tandy is effervescent as Ninny; Masterson has perfected the mischievous Idgie's standoffish mannerisms; and as Ruth, Parker has a doomed, lilting sweetness, a magnificent fragility that is the most touching thing in the film.

Availability: Fried Green Tomatoes is available on video and DVD.

Related reading: Fannie Flagg's book is available in paperback.

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