Steel Magnolias

Steel Magnolias (1988)

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STEEL MAGNOLIAS

Reviewed by Heather Picker

Directed by Herbert Ross. Screenplay by Robert Harling. Starring Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah and Olympia Dukakis, with Tom Skerritt and Sam Shepard. 1989, 117 minutes, Rated PG.

Another of those movies about strong, sassy Southern belles, Steel Magnolias is a quaint crowd pleaser with all the ambition of a very special episode of "Designing Women." Starring Sally Field, Julia Roberts, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah and Olympia Dukakis, and directed by Herbert Ross (who served a brief stint in the '70s and early '80s as Neil Simon's cinematic bitch), all that separates the film from the masses of shoulder-padded Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves movies of the period is the absence of Carly Simon on the soundtrack.

The actresses play a group of women who flock to the local beauty parlor like a bunch of dolled-up seagulls, where they exchange barbs – not the witty kind, by today's standards, but the familiar kind that elicit laughs without cutting too deep (we laugh because we know they're jokes, not because they're funny) – and, naturally, gossip like there's no tomorrow. Star and resident emotional core Field plays M'Lynn Eatenton, mother of Shelby (Roberts), who is hours away from marrying the lawyer from "The Practice." They go to the local salon to get their hair styled, and, as it happens, battling bats Clairee (Dukakis) and Louisa (MacLaine) also have appointments in preparation for the event. This allows self-described "glamour technician" Truvy Jones (Parton) to hire Annelle (Hannah), the new girl in town who nobody knows, and share her credo, "There is no such thing as natural beauty."

It also allows MacLaine and Dukakis to lob catty, prepackaged comments at each other. That's their main function in the movie. Their faces shine and eyes twinkle with every insult - a real live writer, after all, supplied their lines - and the other women watch benevolently. It's all rather harmless until you realize that's all there is. Since Sally Field is around dramatic things must happen; big, sad things that aren't developed from the start - the first 20 or 30 minutes of the movie is too concerned with laughs to pay attention to plot. Gradually, we catch on that Shelby is sick, and we can tell she's one of those tragic, Good, doomed characters by her long, regal neck and porcelain skin and delicate facial features. She's a Southern Audrey Hepburn, and to top it all off she’s a nurse.

There's lots of foreshadowing, so you have time to prepare for the Big, Sad Moment, and when it arrives it's successful to the degree to which your tear ducts cooperate. Myself, I must be dead inside, because I couldn't wait for it - it meant the movie was almost over. What saves Steel Magnolias it is the acting, particularly that of Dolly Parton, who plays a Dolly Parton role (or what used to be a Dolly Parton role back when it was okay to cast women over 35 who aren't Rene Russo in a Hollywood movie) with understated style. She has big hair and a bigger smile, the type that puts you at ease and delivers down-home one-liners cheerfully, but she isn't outrageous. Field is in top form, smiling and crying and having breakdowns, and the rest of the women are equally comfortable in their roles but they don't have Parton's presence or Field's big scenes. You'd think having all that talent on the screen at the same time would leave a mark, but it doesn't.

The characters aren't memorable; they're one-dimensional joke-dispensers who put on little vaudeville acts and try to leave you teary-eyed. And then there's Daryl Hannah. Stuck beneath oversized glasses, messy hair and dowdy librarian clothes, she's all slumped shoulders and forced mousy gawkiness. Her character, the religious one, is given a mysterious past for no reason and a useless love interest for the sake of a stupid, "crazy" ending that's really only crazy if you've never seen a movie before. Equally boring are the men, accessories who are trotted out for social functions when they aren't sitting around looking rugged, like Truvy's oil-rig worker husband (Sam Shepard, collecting a paycheck), or wearing silly and hats and provoking the neighbor's dog, like Tom Skerritt, who grins maniacally as Field's husband because the script says to.

Robert Harling's screenplay, adapted from his own play, has no aspirations (yeah, I said that at the beginning more or less; I'm tired and don't know how else to be disparaging while still using acceptable movie review words instead of things like "crap ass" and "sucky"). His priorities are laughter, teased hair, and heartbreak, in that order. With his awkward plotting we see only pivotal moments over a period of several years, no real development, and that is the film's biggest problem. There's something insidious about the type of movie that provides no characters or plot and expects you to weep at the sad parts and smile through your tears at the remarkable strength of women without doing anything sad or showing any real strength. Steel Magnolias is less a film than an idea. Sally Field is crying, but her tears aren't real.

Availability: Steel Magnolias is available on video and DVD.

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