Steel Magnolias
1989
Herbert Ross
This film felt real because the drama that the characters experience felt real. Steel Magnolias never deigned to tack the melo- prefix onto the "drama." I make it a habit to go into films not knowing what they are about, and so I kept waiting for the hammer to drop, something that was going to pull all the focus, maybe some type of villain to emerge. Maybe Jackson would be revealed to be a domestic abuser, or maybe the slight bickering that M'Lynn and Shelby were doing would blossom into some Splendor in the Grass-esque parental psychodrama. But no, that's not what kind of movie this is. It wasn't an after-school special. These were real people. Their troubles were grounded. The only villain was the passage of time, and the only way to fight back was to lean on your neighbor for support.
Fuck, man, I loved this movie. All the stuff I've been watching for Never Seen It lately has been good, real good, but this was as close to perfect as I've seen in some time. I think even if I had read the description before, I still would have been caught off-guard by how much I loved it, because it doesn't seem on paper like the type of film I would love. It's about "the bond a group of women share in a small-town Southern community." Those details—"women," "Southern," "small-town"—are what makes it particularly charming, but I think the themes would still have landed if you switched some of the details around.
What are the themes? We can point to the scene at the Christmas party, when everyone comforts M'Lynn after Shelby announces her pregnancy—comfort is needed because doctors have said that Shelby, due to her type 1 diabetes, should not have children, due to severe medical risks at the strain it would put on her body. She's rightfully upset and scared. But her friends gather around and get her to accept the reality of the situation, and to try to partake in the joy too, her daughter's joy, the joy of new life and of growing families.
This to me reads like the main theme of the film, that it's so goddamn hard to look outside yourself and your own little world and try to experience things in someone else's shoes. It's so fucking hard, but the love of friends and family makes it a little easier. M'Lynn struggles to understand Shelby's joy at having an ill-advised pregnancy, but is there immediately when Shelby needs a kidney transplant a year after the child is born. Truvy has every reason not to trust Annelle (a mysterious newcomer to the neighborhood, later admitting that her criminal husband ditched her and stole all her shit), but does so anyway, and soon thereafter Annelle becomes an integral part of the community. Ouiser seems to hate the world and everyone in it, but gradually, her walls are broken down by friends who somehow manage to love her despite her town-grump disposition.
Life can grind you down. The melodrama is rare. It ain't like it is in the movies. Rather, life is a series of small pains and small joys. The big moments are rare. But the little things can add up too, and so occasionally, life just becomes something we need to withstand. Empathy helps. Kindness and empathy and friendship. I know that sounds so fucking corny and trite, but in the hands of Steel Magnolias, those ideas begin to feel like a revelation.
Something I really liked about the movie is that it's not a comprehensive timeline of everything that happens in these characters' lives. The story takes place over like four or five years, but we only see get to see a sliver of the story at crucial times. We start around Easter, smash cut eventually to Christmas, then skip ahead two Fourths of July, then two Halloweens, then Easter again. This is so goddamn affective in making the story seem real and natural. We as the audience don't need to know everything. We are not part of the story, we are just privy to it. We are interlopers, watching these friends withstand life together.
I purposefully didn't look up anything about this movie before writing about it. I am afraid that others will convince me that it's not as good as I thought it was. I fear a 2.5-star Ebert review and a dearth of 30th-anniversary think pieces and an award list empty of Oscars. There are some movies that don't need to be groundbreaking art in order for it to have an impact on me. It could've been a play—and indeed, it began its life as one before the playwright wrote the screenplay too—so the filmmaking isn't evocative in any particular way. But the story hits me right in the chest, and the magnificent performances get it there in the first place. We are just peeking in, and it's gotta feel like that. The characters really do feel like they all grew up in the same town, and the story really does make it seem like these are small events that could conceivably occur in any Midwestern community.
I'm about to drop 5 pukes on this bitch, so I feel like I need to ponder why, like the big Why, before I do that. How can I justify that it was a perfect film? Well, I can't, but it felt perfect to me in the moment, anyway. Steel Magnolias took a look at the big picture in life. What does it all mean? And the resonates with me. The act of asking the question, and also finding out that the answer is: live your life as best you can and make sure you share it with others. That cuts deep. It fills me with joy, that these characters, whose stories are not typically told in movies like that, are able to find so much joy and meaning in such normal lives. Gives me hope that maybe my life isn't so normal either.
GRADE: 5 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: Hope the shorter essay was okay today. I'm going to try to keep that going, the ol' 1000-word blog post for this movie project. Gives me more time to watch the damn movies if I'm writing less, in any case. How many words will I write for A Streetcar Named Desire? Probably around 1000 as well. But I guess you never know.
1 comment:
I had a phase of watching 80’s and 90’s dramas over the past few years because they are just perfectly mundane and easy to connect to. Sometimes you don’t need the high stakes.
Post a Comment