Steel Magnolias
As an homage to Dolly Parton, working class hero filled with nobless oblige, I saw this film, where her arc is turning into a capitalist, exploiting the labour of others.
I kid, I kid, this is one of those weapons-grade melodrama that could make the biggest stone faced Grinch weep. They literally pull the plug on Julia Roberts, you thinks the clowns have been shooed away, but they are always there, mourning.
The cast is out of this world, even in bit parts. Sam “Paris, Texas” Shepard. Tom “Alien” Skerrit. Kevin J. “The Mummy” O’Connor. These are only the dudes. The ladies are Sally Field and Julia Roberts, Olympia Dukakis and Shirley fucking MacLaine, Darryl “Blade Runner” Hanna, and finally Dolly Parton. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It’s a constant barrage of quips, usually at the expense of Shirley MacLaine which is playing the Grinchiest old lady in the world. I was not ready for seeing her like this, drinking, burping, stuffing her mouth with food. Getting together with some old acquaintance widow like herself, but keeping her irascibility.
If Shirley MacLaine is the butt of the jokes, Olympia Dukakis is the one delivering them. Hot damn, they just keep coming and coming, non stop zingers, back to back.
The other couple of woman is Julia Roberts as the newly wed daughter, and Sally Field as the perpetually worried working mother. They are both near mental breakdowns anyway, but it turns out there was actually a reason: the daughter is diabetic, so she is a dead girl walking. In modern terms this seems quaint, but it can’t be much further from the truth.
Julia gets so bad after getting pregnant, she even does haemodialysis, gets a new kidney from her own mother, but that’s not enough and she dies while taking care of her child. Life goes on.
Finally, Dolly Parton owns a small beauty salon, a den of gossip, and hires a new girl to help her. Her husband is a construction worker, but can’t find much work independently, so does oddjobs. They quarrel, but love each other.
The new girl is Darryl Hanna. She is actually married, but her hubby ran off, with the property, so she needs to work. She meets a pudgy Kevin J. O’Connor during Julia’s wedding, and they eventually marry and have a child of their own. She gets awfully religious and gets mocked by nearly all other characters.
It starts with Julia’s wedding, she has a child, and dies, so we get her funeral. It ends with Darryl giving birth. It’s the Ciiiiircle of Life!
Apparently, a similar thing happened to the writer’s sister, down to using the real doctors and nurses that actually pulled the plug on her. With the writer and his mother on set. Talk about peer pressure…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.