Fried Green Tomatoes (VHS, 1992)

Fanny Flagg's best-selling novel, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe'," couldn't help but become a terrific film. Flagg's story itself is classic. Stacking the cast with Oscar-winning & extra well beloved actors made this film a modern classic production. Flagg's characters are brought to life by such splendid character actors that they seem like real people in US history. I believe that's what Flagg has in mind when she wrote the novel: to depict reality in a work of fiction.

Kathy Bates plays Evelyn Couch, an overweight, taken-for-granted-housewife, who happens to visit Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) in a rural Georgia nursing home. Threadgoode esteems Couch with her inspiring tales of 2 (presumed lesbian) women Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) & Ruth (Mary Louise Parker), whose love for each other surpasses 1930's Southern supremacist racial, gender & sexual bigotry & discrimination.

The elderly Threadgoode's woman-empowering story told to Couch builds up to Bates delivering a classic line in the film. Wwhen a Volkswagen of twinky teenie boppers cuts her off from a grocery store parking space that Couch has been waiting for, Couch repeatedly rams her car into theirs until she literally shoves it out of the parking space. Then, looks out of her car window flippantly at the astonished girls saying, "Let's face it girls, I'm older & have more insurance!"

Bates' performance has me laughing hysterically & crying in sobs. So, that's why I say she steals the show from an all star cast of women. But with Tandy, Masterson, Tyson & Parker all playing rather equal roles, that's my personal critique. Each actor delivers magnificent in-character performances. Flagg's script & the story are truly brilliant.

Mary Stuart Masterson (Idgie Threadgoode) plays a typical soft butch & woman protective woman of Ruth (Mary Louise Parker) an abused femme mother. Idgie rescues Ruth & the 2 women become partners who live, work & love together until death do they part. Theirs is an understated marriage in every sense of the meaning of marriage. Especially when compared with the straight one that Couch has with a neglectful husband & Ruth's with an abusive brute of a husband. So much for man & woman marriage!

The lesbianism is not overt--it's implied; but to one with a savvy social conscience it is a very typical 1930's US Georgia same-gender love partnership that lasts a lifetime through many hardships.

"Fried Green Tomotaoes" is one of the best films of the late 20th century that effectively confronts Southern supremacism on so very many levels, without doing so in-your-face. As Lao Tzu might say, "doing without doing."

It's all about various love relationships between women, with a cast of Oscar-winning stars, including Cicely Tyson. But, Kathy Bates takes the lead in this mise en scene classic drama~

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