Jon Avnet’s drama earns its warmth through the women at its centre, with Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy particularly persuasive. Predictable plotting and a cautious treatment of sexuality limit it, but the performances make the sentiment worth accepting.
Jon Avnet’s Fried Green Tomatoes is a warm, well-acted drama that earns most of its sentiment. It asks what hearing about another woman’s life can do for someone who needs to change her own, then gives the listener enough importance to make that question worth asking. The storytelling is reassuring, sometimes excessively so. There is pleasure in its account of friendship across two eras, even when the next lesson in self-belief is easy to anticipate.
Kathy Bates is crucial as Evelyn Couch, the woman doing the listening. Evelyn’s involvement in the earlier story is interesting in itself, so returning to her does not feel like an automatic interruption of the better tale. We were moved by Bates’s listening; Evelyn’s absorption in somebody else’s experience makes her own capacity for change believable. She gives the familiar business of learning to value oneself some welcome awkwardness.
Mary Stuart Masterson’s Idgie Threadgoode and Mary-Louise Parker’s Ruth Jamison give the earlier strand its strength. Masterson makes Idgie’s independence convincing without requiring us to approve of her at every moment, and Parker gives Ruth enough presence to make the attachment feel mutual. Their scenes have the emotional pull that the film’s broader statements about friendship need. Jessica Tandy, as Ninny Threadgoode, is just as valuable: her warmth helps the film persuade us that listening to another person’s story can be an event in its own right.
The screenplay by Fannie Flagg and Carol Sobieski, adapted from Flagg’s novel, is less assured about how much explanation these relationships require. The earlier story is more involving, and the connections with Evelyn’s progress can become predictable, however skilfully Bates responds. Debra Neil-Fisher’s editing keeps the movement between periods clear, but the repeated encouragement begins to wear thin. The film runs 130 minutes, and a little less insistence on its lessons would have left more room for the performances.
Geoffrey Simpson’s cinematography keeps Evelyn’s responses worth watching when she has little to do but listen. Barbara Ling’s production design contributes to the earlier story’s homely appeal, though that pleasantness sometimes weakens our sense of the intolerance the women face. We want those surroundings to feel a little less welcoming when the story considers the cost of being different. Thomas Newman’s music is sympathetic to the tenderness, but occasionally supplies reassurance when the actors have already done enough.
Avnet’s caution about sexuality is harder to overlook. Masterson and Parker give the women’s attachment a depth that the film’s broad celebration of friendship does not fully account for. No declaration is needed, but the discretion feels evasive in a drama that asks us to applaud women for refusing to conform. Reassuring stories about female friendship often smooth away uncomfortable questions, and this one is too willing to do the same.
These reservations do not cancel the pleasure of the performances. Bates makes Evelyn’s transformation worth following, while Tandy keeps the earnestness from becoming oppressive. Choose it for an evening of sympathetic company, with a little more instruction in self-belief than is strictly necessary.
