Welcome to Rearview Mirror, a monthly movie column in which I re-view and then re-review a movie I have already seen under the new (and improved?) critical lens of 2022. I’m so happy you’re here.
I dunno why but when I saw Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as a child in theaters, it imprinted on my chewy little brain. I vividly remembered many scenes: Ashley Judd’s husband shoving a BLT in her mouth after she whipped her kids with a belt in the rain, Sandra Bullock mentally adding up all the money she spent on therapy, a woman’s one true love dying in the war so she has to marry just some schmo, a little girl taking a sip of what she thinks is water but is actually vodka, and, most crucially, a mother convincing a propeller plane pilot to take them up after her daughter had changed her mind about not wanting a ride. Maybe I remembered it so well because each of these moments is a touching, sometimes even searing, vignette, themselves memories relayed by the present-day characters. Strung together, they only vaguely resemble a plot—but really, so what?
Based on some novels that were, I assume, a hit on the book club circuit, Divine Secrets goes like this: In the distant past, four best friends in Louisiana promise to be wild women who support each other forever. Also, they are not racist and are really nice to their Black nannies, which gets hammered home pretty quickly after they throw pie in the face of a boy who is racist. Just so everyone is clear here, these old Southern women: not racist. Anyway, they grow up a little bit, and the leader girl, vivacious Vivi, is now played by Ashley Judd, and her parents are always fighting. Her mom (Cherry Jones) is kind of like the mom in Carrie with the religiosity bordering on mental illness.
Vivi wants to be a “big city newspaper woman” and also marry the dad from Gossip Girl, who is one of her friends’ brothers, but he dies in the war so she marries some nice guy instead. All the friends are alcoholics, but Vivi is the most alcoholic, and since this is, I guess, the ’60s (it’s the South, so everything looks kinda 1940s-ish but…it’s not then?), a doctor prescribes her pills to help her quit drinking, and the pills make her crazy and she’s a pretty bad mom, hovering somewhere between negligent and abusive. So she goes away to a mental institution for six months, which her eldest daughter Sidda understands to be her mom just ditching the family because no one will admit that mental illness is a thing.
This movie is good the way The Notebook is good: it’s not, but it’s great.
Cut to some many years later. Sidda is now Sandra Bullock, a New York playwright engaged to a nice man, and she blabs about her bad childhood to a reporter, and her mom, who is now Ellen Burstyn, reads it and they get into a fight via snail mail. And her dad is now James Garner. And one of Vivi’s friends is Maggie Smith! So Maggie Smith and company literally drug Sidda and bring her back to Louisiana so that they can tell her all of the above stories and make her understand that her mother was troubled but not evil—and she does, and mother and daughter make up in the end. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the recent hit Everything Everywhere All at Once in some respects, but that’s a topic for another time.
I’ll just come right out and say I love this genre of movie. I loved Book Club and I’m excited for the sequel; I love all the parts in both Mamma Mia!s where Donna and her gal pals shriek at each other about men; I love Fried Green Tomatoes and I haven’t seen Steel Magnolias but I bet I would love that, too. Whenever it’s, like, four old women and one younger one and they’re dealing with life and love? That’s great. Jerry Bruckheimer’s ex-wife produced this movie, along with Bette Midler. So great. It was written and directed by Callie Khouri, who also wrote Thelma & Louise. Yes! Good! Love it!
Critics pretty much didn’t like this movie because it’s sentimental and saccharine—which it is, but also, most of those critics were men, and this is clearly a movie For The Girls. While the women are doing their silly sisterhood ritual, the men sit outside on the porch drinking beer, and that’s just what you have to expect going in. This movie is good the way The Notebook (also starring James Garner!) is good: it’s not, but it’s great.
Actually, you know what? I am gonna talk about hit du jour EEAAO. I liked it a lot, and it was very original. It was also a pretty straightforward story, just from a set-up/pay-off standpoint, as well as making its message and central relationships clear. Which is great! Mothers and daughters figuring their shit out is plenty to build a narrative on, and if you want to dress it up with multiverse bells and kung-fu whistles to make it more entertaining, culturally specific, and existentially profound, obviously, that works really well. But people wouldn’t be responding to it at all if “I can’t stop fighting with my mom” weren’t an inherently good premise on its own, and if Divine Secrets doesn’t pull this off as well as the Danielseseses, well, at least it tries! Not everything has to be, like, art. Some of this movie works, some of it doesn’t. Here’s what does:
People wouldn’t be responding to EEAAO at all if “I can’t stop fighting with my mom” weren’t an inherently good premise on its own, and if Divine Secrets doesn’t pull this off as well as the Daniels, well, at least it tries!
Vivi and the Ya-Yas take their kids to the county fair, where a pilot is taking groups up for rides in his prop plane. Sidda is too scared to go, so she opts out, but by the end of the ride home, she wishes she had flown. I know that pang. I know that feeling of indecision followed by guilt and regret. It’s especially poignant in childhood, when we’re still figuring out how actions and consequences work, when we’re still finding our comfort zones, when we’re easily intimidated and often disappointed. And I don’t think I’ve seen it portrayed quite that clearly in any other movie.
Sidda confesses and Vivi drives back to the field to bribe the pilot, but she doesn’t have the cash, so she goes to the gas station but the attendant won’t let her charge anything but gas to her husband’s account, so she does a swap with a fancy lady filling up, and by the end of the day, she and Sidda are in the air. If that doesn’t get you just a little bit, fix your heart. FL
