Sob Sisters

National Review Online, June 26, 2002

Even the trailers were a sign that I was in a strange place. Instead of the usual fare, tantalizing glimpses of fast cars, brutal murders, sinister aliens, and seething high-school passion, the movies previewed included a "mature love story" (apparently dedicated to the astonishing idea that romance is possible among the over-50s) and a multigenerational family drama (we were urged to "go ahead and cry") starring Susan Sarandon. But the sobs would not have to wait for Socialist Sue. For this was chick-flick night, a chance to discover the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie that is, warned the Los Angeles Times, "rich in emotional life." And moviegoers know what that means — tears, rows, mothers fighting daughters, daughters fighting mothers, hissy fits, shouting matches, and hugs, all culminating in a definitive reconciliation somewhere towards the conclusion of the final reel, often at about the time one of the key characters perishes of a terminal, but not unsightly, disease.

If that is what you are looking for, the Ya-Yas don't disappoint, except that the only person to die is the hapless (but handsome) Jack Whitman, who comes to the requisite tragic end, but relatively early in the movie. Jack is unlucky in love, and unluckier in war. He joins the air force not long after Pearl Harbor (seemingly more to impress his father than to depress Hitler) and, poor fellow, is killed before he has had much chance to enjoy his budding affair with the lovely Vivi, drama queen and lead Ya-Ya. Like Jack, Vivi (played excellently as a younger woman by Ashley Judd, and, in her old age, by a less-convincing Ellen Burstyn) never appears to get over this setback. Being dead, Jack has an excuse. Vivi does not. No matter. In this movie, self-indulgent is usually just an adjective, only a criticism when applied to those perennial symbols of boomer disdain for the older generation: drink, cigs and Feelgood-era pharmaceuticals.

Of course, a touch of the exotic always helps pull in the ladies: Just ask Fabio. In Divine Secrets this is provided by a gorgeous Louisiana setting, the perfect excuse for good music, bad behavior, ridiculous names (Siddalee!), cookery porn (crayfish!), and wild overacting (ham!). Naturally, this being the south, the past, as Faulkner once put it, is never dead; it is not even past. No one is prepared to follow the advice of another, less distinguished, southerner and simply "move on." Instead, most of the movie is dedicated, mainly through a series of flashbacks, to showing how the damaged Vivi proceeds to damage everybody else for the next six decades. Propped up only by the support of the Ya-Yas (a sorority she formed with her three closest childhood friends), pills, booze, and tobacco, Vivi is a poor wife and unsatisfactory mother. We only meet her husband, Shep, in his later years, but his weary expression is more than enough to tell the tale of a marriage that has been more for worse than for better. Old Shep has become a withdrawn, stoic figure (portrayed with dignified melancholy by James Garner) still fond of his high-maintenance Ya-Ya, but careful always to lock the door to his (separate) bedroom at night.

Vivi's dealings with her children are shown in rather more detail. The high maintenance wife was, it turns out, an even higher-maintenance mother, capable of acts of love, of cruelty, and of something that was a bit of both. As a result, her relationship with her offspring is, to say the least, tricky. Remarks by her eldest daughter, Sidda (a rather muted Sandra Bullock), in a magazine interview trigger a crisis between mother and daughter, which only the Ya-Yas can resolve. They do so by kidnapping Sidda and gradually revealing her mother's deepest, darkest, and far from divine, secret: Vivi once had a breakdown so total that she was taken away from her kids and institutionalized. Relief all round! Mom wasn't nasty after all, just nuts. A blissful Sidda reconciles with Vivi, Shep unlocks his door and Sidda decides to marry her Shep-in-waiting, Connor (a soft-spoken Irish hunk played with quiet charm by Angus MacFadyen), a man who has clearly not been studying his future in-laws' family history.

Does any of this make any sense? Not exactly. An even vaguely believable story is one of the casualties of the film's complex heritage. Divine Secrets is a bowdlerized version of Rebecca Wells's novel of the same name, which is itself a prettied-up companion to her 1992 debut, Little Altars Everywhere, and quite a lot has got lost in the process. Typical products of an era when most Americans seem to have believed that they had been molested by a close relative during childhood, these books fill in the gaps left in the movie's narrative by a creative team unwilling, presumably, to frighten off potential ticket buyers.

The books reveal that Vivi was not only badly abused by her mother (something that is hinted at in the film) but, quite probably, her father too. This complies with a basic rule of boomer fiction (fatally flawed families) and makes much more sense as a source of Vivi's later instability than the more romantic alternative put forward in the movie: that the Ya-Ya was pining for her pilot. Vivi may have been crazy about Jack, but I doubt if his death would have been enough to drive her mad. Equally, the remarkably tortured relationship between Vivi and her grown children becomes more understandable after reading that the abuse she inflicted on them was far worse than anything depicted on screen.

Not that this matters. The audience for this film is expecting two hours of lush Louisiana gush, the moviegoers' equivalent of aromatherapy, massage, and a nice long soak, and that is what they get, much of it in front of the most empathetic stretch of water since that famous Golden Pond. Those few who worry about plot details will probably have read the books, and, as we have discussed, if they haven't they will need to. As for the other characters in the movie, no one has to think too hard about them; their characters are caricatures, crudely drawn bayou nobility with the mannerisms of a clutch of drag queens. They are talking props, a Greek chorus with nothing (but too much) to say and if everyone (except calm Shep and doomed Connor) and everything in this movie seem a little overwrought, well, that's just chick-flick high-jinks. Besides, a quick look at some of Ms. Wells's original prose would suggest that understatement was never on the cards:

"If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture."

Oh, is there a little of that loopy feminist-pagan thing swinging around unhinged in there? You bet, but, reduced to a subtext, it is one of the few aspects of the film that is underplayed, except, that is, for a moment of total absurdity near the end: Vivi, standing in the center of a circle of flaring, blazing sparklers is shown offering up a prayer to a Virgin Mary, who, one can only hope, is kindly enough not to burst out into amazed, startled laughter. As for me, a man from Mars watching a film from Venus, it was just another reminder that rationality, logic, and a sense of proportion had long since fled this unapologetically manipulative piece of hokum. If chicks could dig a flick like this, I was ready to proclaim to the world the superior reasoning powers of my own sex. Then I remembered something:

The movies of Jerry Bruckheimer.