Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.8 / 5.0

Sentiment, Soap Opera, and A Dash of Comedy:

Fannie Flag's interesting novel gets a gallon of gloss in this very Hollywood movie clearly created with a female audience in mind. The result is a well performed but somewhat uneasy mixture of sentiment, comedy and soap opera.

In terms of story, the film operates on two levels. An increasingly frustrated middleaged woman living in Alabama (Bates) examine her life and finds it sadly lacking--but by chance she makes the acquaintance of a nursing home resident (Tandy) whose stories of the past encourage the... more info

On boy, oh boy, oh boy:

This movie gets high marks in every category for faithfulness to the original book by Fannie Flagg. Kathy Bates plays an ignored wife just trying desperately to get her husband's attention. She visits her mother-in-law at a nursing home, but the nasty old woman throws things at her and she retreats to the community room to eat candy from her purse - and there she meets a lonely old woman (Jessica Tandy, so you just KNOW how good this movie will be!) whose tale of a lifelong friendship between Izzy and Ruth... more info

Great Southern Storytelling on the Screen:

I'm always surprised how badly great storytelling makes it to the screen. Particularly, great Southern stories, which tend to make it to the big screen replete with caricatures and stereotypes. I recall, with particular sadness, the movie adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. While this adaptation to the screen of Flagg's tremendously moving novel does have its share of simple, stereotypical southern "archetypes", these are largely drawn from Flagg's book, and are largely essential to the... more info

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