MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Steel Magnolias’--A Cacophony of Southern Belles

In the published version of Robert Harling’s play “Steel Magnolias,” he opens with this cautionary author’s note: “The women in this play are witty, intelligent and, above all, real characters. They in no way, shape or form are meant to be portrayed as cartoons or caricatures.”

In Harling’s movie adaptation (opening Friday throughout San Diego County), directed by Herbert Ross, he must have prefaced his script with the reverse caution. The film’s yammering sextet is relentlessly cartoonish. They do so much prancing and sashaying and elbowing that the film, set in small-town Louisiana, turns into Southern-fried vaudeville. The knockabout unbelievability is exhausting. You want to run for cover.

M’Lynn (Sally Field) is the well-to-do matron whose pretty-as-a-peach daughter Shelby (Julia Roberts), a severe diabetic, is about to be married. Truvy (Dolly Parton), the owner of her own styling salon, Truvy’s Beauty Spot, presides over Shelby’s pouffing and perfuming. The Beauty Spot is the town’s mission control for gossip, and, in the film’s opening minutes, we’re introduced to its leading players. Besides M’Lynn, Shelby and Truvy, there are Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), the preening widow of the town’s former mayor; Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine), a rich, wildly eccentric scold; and Annelle (Daryl Hannah), the salon’s mousy new “born-again” assistant.

In the course of the film, these women are thrown into crises that call upon their deepest reserves of empathy. And are they ever empathic! They stalk about acting curmudgeonly in order--of course--to hide how deeply they care. They go in for heavy-duty bonding. Where trouble hits, weeping and wisecracks are sure to follow. When Truvy says “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,” she’s acting as the writer’s mouthpiece.

Harling’s play, his first, has been “opened up” as a movie, and, as a result, his dramatic intentions are clearer than they were on the stage. “Steel Magnolias” is a serio-comic yowl about the sustaining powers of sisterhood. It’s also, by implication, a retort to all the male-bonding dramas in our midst. The film makers want us to recognize the tensile strength in the filigree of women’s lives. These gals may be nurturing but they’re also hardscrabble.

By contrast, the wimpification of the men in this movie is fairly amusing to observe. Shelby’s husband (Dylan McDermott), her father (Tom Skerrit), Annelle’s hubbie (Kevin O’Connor), Truvy’s mate (Sam Shepard) are all secondary players. They loiter, dazed, on the fringes of the action. Because few films feature as many women as this one does, their prominence here is a form of pay-back. They’ve seized the screen from the big boys and they won’t let go.

Some of the seizing is artful, some isn’t. Parton has a sweet, lilting presence, and a suggestion of hard-won disappointment beneath her wigs and wide smiles. Roberts has such fragile freshness that the scene in which she goes into diabetic shock seems like a violation of nature. Dukakis isn’t breaking any new ground with her trademarked snideness, but she gets off a few zingers. (She also seems triumphantly impervious to her sometime Southern accent.) Field is rather bland, though--too teary and noble. And MacLaine is wretched. Her performance is a scenery-gobbling amalgam of her work in films like “Terms of Endearment” and “Madame Sousatzka.”

Another of Truvy’s sayings is, “There is no such thing as natural beauty,” but the entire film stands in opposition to this credo. It is precisely the natural, untrussed beauty of these women that we’re meant to recognize. Harling and Ross may be deliberately going for the exaggerated and the overblown. They may be pouffing reality, but only as a heightened contrast to their people’s all-too-real sorrows. The trouble is, the pouffing crowds out the pathos. That’s not entirely bad. The slapstick camaraderie at least has some energy, while the pathos is shameless, four-hanky stuff.

Obviously, the film makers have higher ambitions. The six women with their different backgrounds and temperaments are intended as a symbolic cross-section of femalehood; their plights are representative of all women. But things have gotten out of hand. Instead of a soul-sister ensemble, what we get is a screenful of ego-pumped actresses clonking each other for the spotlight. These belles should take their act on the road as tag-team wrestlers.

‘STEEL MAGNOLIAS’

A Tri-Star Pictures release. Executive producer Victoria White. Producer Ray Stark. Director Herbert Ross. Screenplay Robert Harling, based on his play “Steel Magnolias.” Music Georges Delerue. Production design Gene Callahan and Edward Pisoni. Costumes Julie Weiss. Film editor Paul Hirsch. With Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Julia Roberts, Tom Skerrit, Sam Shepard.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).