Steel Magnolias is the ultimate chick flick about a bunch of women who are sometimes friends and sometimes frenemies who share each others’ lives down somewhere in the state of Louisiana. It opens on the wedding day of a girl named Shelby who has some kind of complicated diabetic condition that’s made her somewhat frail. Despite her mother’s and doctor’s misgivings on the subject, she is determined to have a baby with her husband-to-be. Meanwhile, a hair-dresser named Truvy has recently hired a quirky and mysterious weird chick who fits in as the outsider of the group for most of the film. Shelby invites them along with several other friends to the wedding and we watch them all grow older together over the next 2 in-movie years or so.
This film is remarkable in that it doesn’t really tell a singular story from one central character’s point of view. Rather, it opts to just let the audience peer into the daily lives of a group of women, all at different stages of their lives, with a myriad of personalities both complimentary and complementary. Shelby’s plight is the closest thing we get to an actual plot, but my thought on the subject is that it just gives all the characters something to talk about, something that drums up interest. There isn’t anything particularly special about any of them aside from the fact that they are all charming in their own quirky way while sharing an exactly appropriate amount of screen time with one another. For what it’s worth, the writing and script are very smart in that there is very little overlap here; everyone fills their niche. There are neither hopes, nor dreams of a greater good, nor some inner desire to find the self hitting us over the head constantly (well, except for maybe in Shelby’s case), and all of this makes Steel Magnolias quite pleasant and bearable.
I hear that this movie makes people cry when the you-know-what-happens. I just couldn’t be moved that way, though. I think the collectivistic tendencies of the group kind of overwhelm any real sense of tragedy. You just know that they are going to make it through and be as happy as they were before. The moral of the story seems to be that life goes on; we’re all friends here, we’ll make it through together. I like the film for this reason. Now-a-days, you’d get these sequences where each character would get some time to deal with the problem in their own minds and learn some quirky or new thing about themselves that may or may not serve the story, but here that is definitely not the case. We grow up with these ladies, and we emerge from the end credits with the understanding that collectively our lives have gotten a tiny bit better.
ThomFiles 