Cinema: A Home-Cooked Tale

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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. R.S.