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- <text id=92TT0215>
- <title>
- Jan. 27, 1992: View Points:Cinema
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Jan. 27, 1992 Is Bill Clinton For Real?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- VIEW POINTS, Page 67
- CINEMA
- A Home-Cooked Tale
- </hdr><body>
- <p> A very old lady (Jessica Tandy), confined to a nursing home,
- strikes up a friendship with a younger woman (Kathy Bates) who
- eats too much because she is emotionally starved by her
- marriage. What brings them together is a long, slightly shaggy
- story the older woman relates. It is about the friendship of
- headstrong Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and ladylike Ruth
- (Mary-Louise Parker), two young women of the 1930s, and it
- involves home cooking, wife beating and a murder. It is an
- uneasy blend of (among other things) whimsy, melodrama, the Ku
- Klux Klan and feminist sentiment that coexists rather awkwardly
- with the modern story. Like most movies that wish mainly to warm
- our hearts, Fried Green Tomatoes is basically a lie. But it
- works. In part that's because all the actresses ground their
- archetypal characters in strongly realized reality, in part
- because the skittery script doesn't permit us to dwell on any
- of its improbabilities, and in part because director Jon Avnet
- energetically insists that the light of sheer good nature can
- always banish the essential blackness of his tale.
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Schickel.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-