Fried Green Tomatoes Review

Fried Green Tomatoes is a 1991 American comedy-drama directed by John Avent and written by Carol Sobieski and Fannie Flagg, based on the book “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café” written by Flagg herself. The film stars Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Mary-Louise Parker, Gailard Sartain, Timothy Scott, and Cicely Tyson. The film follows the story of an unhappy housewife named Evelyn Couch as she meets an elderly woman named Ninny Threadgoode who tells her the story of a depression era relationship between reckless Idgie Threadgoode and her friend Ruth Jamison, and hearing these stories gives Evelyn the confidence she needs to actively try to fix her failing marriage.

If one were to watch Fried Green Tomatoes and absolutely love it, to think it was the greatest masterpiece in cinema the world had ever known, to think that the relationships portrayed were profound and beautiful, to think that the films statements on women and courage to be inspiring and emotional, I would absolutely understand. I completely understand why so many people love this movie and why so many people will adamantly defend this as a cult classic, but to me, the splints in its seams are so evident and inexcusable that I find it impossible to invest myself in the films messages and morals, which at a critical standpoint, lack any sense of self or individuality.

The films problems start in the first few scenes. The film features characters who are tortured and hurting, but its shot, edited, scored, and performed like a comedy. I understand how a director might think that making the film like a comedy despite having serious subject matters might make the film more unique, as the comedy would be elevated and the contrast between the dramatic and comedic aspects might make audiences reflect on the comedically tragic nature of relationships, as if to say “it’s funny things turned out like that” but instead what it creates is a tonal war that wages throughout the entire runtime. The film tries to juggle its depressing themes with its more upbeat moments, almost in an American Beauty-esque way. I feel that this film in a lot of ways is what American Beauty perfected, which is capturing a aging soul in a trapped situation, simultaneously portraying their situation as tragically funny and whimsically depressing. It took 8 years after the release of Fried Green Tomatoes for a film to get it right, but I do believe that’s what it was going for in terms of atmosphere, a sort of universal comedy that leaves one with tears in their eyes. What happens instead is scenes that I normally would find hilarious taken straight as an arrow and scenes that are played for comedy leaving the audience with a dry sense in their mouth as they realize it was supposed to make them laugh, sort of like when one watches a sitcom and while the joke itself isn’t funny, the existence of canned laughter forces a guffaw out of most people.

Once the actual plot begins, we open on characters that while likable and sweet, aren’t particularly interesting to watch. they are very ordinary, especially Evelyn and Ninny, and while that is clearly the intention, it wasn’t done with enough purpose that the films status was elevated by any means. Typically, when you write a film about the ordinality of man, you write a character who is exaggeratedly ordinary, because someone who is average and lacks anything special, no matter how potent in a cinematic sense, they’re dull to watch. they need something, and by something I don’t mean Evelyn’s cravings which don’t much lead to anything. It actually appears a bit confusing, as later in the film she begins taking hormone pills and they not only take her cravings away but somehow make her like veggies again. These are the problems with the characters in the present day, simply their lack of originality, and then when you go to the story of Idgie and Ruth, we see how far the opposite way the script can go, as instead of being devoid of personality, those two characters have an annoying abundance of personality to the point that they don’t act like real people anymore, instead they more behave like puppets or cartoons controlled by the whims of the plot. They become predictable and boring for a complete other reason. My favorite character was Idgie, not because of the writing, but because I think Mary Stuart Masterson gave the best performance in the film. That being said, Idgie’s character is rebellious and overly excitable and all, which by itself is okay, but in the film, we see how this came to be. We see her being a bit of a punk as a child and being consoled by her brother, so when her brother dies, the implication is that the brother was the only thing keeping her from being losing her mind, but the film equally implies that it was the brothers death that in fact transformed her into a rebellious person. So, was she rebellious or not before the brothers death? Is her entire adult life based on a death that occurred when she wasn’t even 10 or was, she already growing towards that direction? The brother is portrayed as a guide for her, but he simply guides her towards controlling her existing emotions, therefore that rebellious nature isn’t a direct result of her brother’s death, even though the movie seems to forget that. The character of Ruth is a bit flat, and until about an hour into the film, every time she’s on screen you can hear crickets, as she barely does anything, and for the first hour seems to only exist in the story as a catalyst for Idgie, which I will always call lazy writing.

The plot of this movie in terms of the Idgie and Ruth story is very simple. Set in Whistlestop, Alabama, Ruth was Idgie’s big brother’s girlfriend when he died in an extremely predictable and comical fashion by having his boot get caught in the train tracks. Ruth leaves Alabama and returns years later when Idgie is a young woman to help her move on from the death of her brother. She originally resists her attempts at friendship but eventually grows to care for Ruth. Ruth eventually has to leave Whistlestop to marry Frank Bennett and move to Valdosta, Georgia. Idgie visits her years later to find that she’s pregnant and physically abused by her husband. Idgie convinces Ruth to return to Whistlestop and there her child, Buddy Jr. is born. The duo open the Whistlestop Café with the help of the African American family cook, Sipsey, and her son, Big George. The café becomes popular around the town for its delicious barbecue. Eventually, Frank returns to Whistlestop to kidnap his son but he’s knocked out by an unknown assailant and is then reported missing. Soon after, his truck is found at the bottom of a nearby river and Idgie becomes the first suspect as she had previously threatened to kill Frank. The local sheriff Grady Kilgore offers to release her and frame Big George, an offer which she denies. During the trial, Reverend Scroggins, a local priest, lies in court and gives the two sound alibis and the judges rules it an accident due to Franks infamous reputation for drinking. Following the trial, Ruth gets cancer and slowly dies. The café closes soon after her death and most residents of the small town move away, and as Ninny is telling this story to Evelyn, she reveals the true fate of Frank, which was that Sipsey killed him with a hit to the head from a frying pan. To cover the evidence, they decided to cook up Frank’s body and feed it to an investigator looking into the circumstances of Franks disappearance.

Reading this plot, a few things are made glaringly apparent. As I mentioned that this film does a poor job juggling its comedy and drama, it seems to have a very basic story that changes drastically in tone throughout the film, as this plot is very serious but in the film it unfolds in a comedic manner, as emotional scenes are often punctuated with jokes. This is in part due to the 1-dimensional nature of the characters, as they lack a lot of creativity and thus rely on predictable plot points to let the story unfold, or rather force it to unfold. The film lacks inventiveness and creativity, as much of the story reads like a Tennessee Williams play, but what makes the plays by Williams so unique is their sequence of events and how the story is told, not specifically the content of the story itself. In a Tennessee Williams play, like A Streetcar Named Desire for instance, nothing in the play is all that original on its own, and its strengths are in its twisted and detailed characters, and the creative way the story is told, where there’s tension and mystery, there unknown intentions and enigmatic personas. It makes the play an adventure in trying to figure out who is good and who isn’t. The film never has that sense of mystery or awe for the audience and instead opts to spell out the most obvious of character and story details. “these are the good guys, you can tell because they are happy and carefree, and these are the bad guys because they’re mean and cynical.” The film definitely does create a world for itself, a world in which characters who are this black and white can exist, but the world isn’t believable. There is no point during this movie do you believe that Idgie Threadgoode or Ruth Jamison can exist in this world, because they fit too well. They were not placed into the world they live in, but rather the world they live in was molded to fit them snuggly, so everything about the movie feels glossy and safe. We never question Idgie’s morals or Ruth’s morals. The good guys are always unrelentingly the good guys and the bad guys are cartoonish buffoons who have backwards morals and even worse racism. The movie never seeks to challenge the audience or give them a story that doesn’t play out as expected, which leads me to my next major criticism.

I don’t like movies that play it safe. I understand that not every movie can be an experimental head trip but what’s the point of making a film that spoon-feeds the audience everything they want to see as though they were tantrum throwing toddlers demanding this and that in their movie? With a camera, you have the power to potentially alter someone’s entire world view, how they see love, life, loss, people, power, economy, politics, comedy, death, happiness, religion, fate, and so many other themes that are embellished in our everyday lives. Why would you make something that explores nothing? Fried Green Tomatoes has imagery of racism for example but does nothing with it and instead plays it safe, leaving it to the background. So many ideas and images are left to the background, never to be explored. How does the loss of a sibling effect a child? All of that is skipped over. How does a midlife crisis develop and make you question your identity? We don’t show that just that she’s gorging on food. It has nothing to say and it almost parades itself as having something to say, as the film carries a sense of self-importance, with so many scenes carrying empty moral philosophies that are obvious to your average person and will challenge no one. I will reference another example that particularly annoyed me, and what I am about to say I mean with all the respect and courtesy in the world. Ruth and Idgie are the two gayest characters ever portrayed in a motion picture and the fact that the movie didn’t have the guts to make them actually gay is everything that is wrong with this film. Idgie and Ruth have a relationship that surpasses any kind of platonic friendship and it is very clearly, deeply, romantic attraction, and if you don’t believe me, rewatch the film but picture Idgie as a Brad Pitt type and you will very quickly see the romantic and sexual tension between the two so thick you couldn’t cut it with a power saw. The film doesn’t commit, instead it plays as a wishy washy “maybe they could be gay I don’t know” by showing them clearly care for each other in a way that exceeds friendship, showing Idgie leaving notes on Ruth’s gravestone writing how she “will always love her”, showing them staring at each other for long stretches of time like a married couple. In the book, they do have a romantic relationship and it is one of the foundations of the novel, as is the racism that perpetuates its villains, but everything is washed out until it becomes bland and inoffensive. The only thing anyone could find offensive about this film is its lack of courage to be offensive, which begs the question I asked at the beginning. Why make something that says nothing, especially if you’re adapting a book that says something?

Besides these horrible degrading elements to the script, there are still some other plot related mishaps which some might call nitpicks, but I think it’s fair criticism. The mystery as to who killed Frank Bennett is horribly uninteresting and the film doesn’t really give us much of a reason to care about who killed Frank Bennett, especially with the simplicity in which the reverend lies and gets away with it. It deflates so much of the tension and stakes when they get away with it, so think about it this way. our main concern is that Idgie is going to be arrested for the murder of Frank, however within the same scene that this threat is introduced, it is diminished and ultimately thrown away. So, Ruth obviously didn’t do it, and now Idgie didn’t do it, so why should I care who did it? I think Idgie should’ve been wrongly convicted or something of that nature, because at that moment the story had no stakes. There was no reason to me to fear for Idgie, and thus the scene falls flat. There are 3 funeral scenes in this film, one for buddy which is dead serious, and one for Ruth which is equally serious, and one in between for Buddy Jr.’s arm, as it got taken off from getting hit by a train, to which I have several questions. Firstly, why was Buddy Jr. down at the train tracks? With the amount of times Idgie has brought up her brother, you’d think the kid would be more cautious down there. It’s the equivalent from your mother that your uncle died on a very specific road from playing on it and then you go down there and play the exact same way. all that aside, he goes up and down the tracks and gets his foot stuck in the same area, even though it was shown that the reason Buddy Sr. got stuck was his wide boots, and when he took them off it was okay, so what size shoes do Buddy Jr. wear? After he narrowly escapes death, its revealed he just lost an arm. Not just a hand, but the entire arm at the shoulder. So, did the train run over the arm? Did it just hit the arm as they pulled out Buddy Jr.? The math of that one doesn’t really work out, but the biggest problem with that scene is firstly, why is it in the movie? It doesn’t serve any thematic purpose and ultimately doesn’t matter and imagine how much better this movie would’ve been if that valuable time had been spent on establishing the lesbian relationship between Ruth and Idgie, something that actually matters to the underlying subtext of discrimination and isolation in the American south during the depression. My only other big flaw with the plot in the Idgie/Ruth story was the dialogue. It was incredibly forced and seldom hitting the emotional beat its reaching for, be it sad or funny. Instead it just feels like listening to ballroom chatter, empty noise that occupies a space.

There is almost nothing to say about the Kathy Bates story line. I can summarize it in a sentence, and I guarantee you’d only miss trivial gossip. The story is that of Evelyn Couch trying to spice up her marriage and drab life with courses and chocolate to no avail, but in learning about Idgie, she becomes inspired to stand up for herself and it ultimately makes her love her life more. That’s it. There’s not much else to it, besides the typical scenes you would expect, a scene of some sort of public empowering outburst from Evelyn (it comes in the form of her purposefully hitting some teenagers cars when they steal her parking spot and say perhaps the unintentionally funniest line in the film, “face it lady, we’re younger and faster”), a scene of her crying when Ninny dies, or is at least presumed dead, and a scene of her being overly eccentric and pushy to her husband when trying to reform their marriage, all of which happen in ways that require very little critical insight or breaking down of the scene in one’s head to find deeper meanings, because evidently enough, most of the time the hidden meaning is not present. Kathy Bates does a good job with what she’s given, and she’s a phenomenal actress, but she really didn’t have much to do in this film, so her performance is mostly left over. The entire plot of this storyline is just American Beauty without all the things that make American Beauty so good, a basic story with a kind of annoying main character.

The technical aspects of this movie were surprisingly competent, as I can recall some shots that spoke a little to the visual storytelling of the film. It was nothing grandiose or even all that clever, just some ways that they angled characters to show the power struggle between them was interesting, and how the couple was shown to be separated through windows and different light sources was moderately entertaining. The music choices were horrendous and terribly out of place, causing only destruction to the films overall final product. The sound design was perfectly average, and the editing was a bit underwhelming, as it was very predictable and obvious, to the point where towards the end I was mouthing the word “cut” along with the editing. The sets were perfectly acceptable despite the film doing a horrid job of establishing the time period at first. It was the 1920’s but they spoke like the 1950’s and dressed like the 1910’s it was wonderfully confusing, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s a drama that lacks forward motion or a comedy that lacks purpose, either way to me, what it lacks is the heart to be something new, and instead took the fall to be average.

Fried Green Tomatoes gets a 5/10