Fried Green Tomatoes (DVD, 1998, Collector's Edition; Extended Version)

Fanny Flagg composed this best-selling novel, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe'. Making it into this all-star classic production had to have been a given. Flagg's characters had to be portrayed.

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 two (presumed lesbian) women Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth (Mary Louise Parker) whose love surpasses 1930's Southern bigotry and discrimination due to racial, gender, and sexual supremacism.

The elderly Threadgoode's woman empowering story told to Couch builds up to Bates delivering a classic line in the film when a Volkswagen of twinky teenie boppers cuts her off from the parking space Couch has been waiting for. Couch (Bates) rams her car into theirs until she shoves it literally out of the parking space. Then looks out of her car window flippantly at the astonished girls saying, "I'm older and have more insurance!" Bates has me both laughing hysterically and crying in sobs. So I say she steals the show from a star cast of women. But with Tandy, Masterson, Tyson, and Parker all playing rather equal roles, that's my personal critique. Each actor delivers magnificent in-character performances. The script and the story are truly brilliant.

Mary Stuart Masterson (Idgie Threadgoode) plays a typical soft butch and protective woman of Mary Louise Parker (Ruth) an abused femme mother. Idgie rescues Ruth and the two women live, work, and love together until death do they part. Theirs is an understated marriage in every sense of the meaning marriage. Especially when compared with the straight one that Bates (Couch) has. The lesbianism is not overt--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 and through many a hardship.

I'd say one of the best films of the late 20th century that deals with 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 I say Bates takes the cake in this classic.

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