[9]

It may be steeped in sentiment and nostalgia, but Fried Green Tomatoes doesn’t need to use them as a crutch to elicit a powerful emotional response.  It’s got bigger guns than that:  character and storytelling.  It’s one of the rare movies that successfully captures the importance of real, honest-to-God friendship, whether its reflected in the toned-down affection between Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker (whose characters are lesbians in Fannie Flagg’s novel), or in the budding friendship of Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy.  It’s a marvel that the movie can cut back and forth between the two story lines and keep both equally interesting.

Terrific performances all around, including some touching work from Cicely Tyson and Stan Shaw in supporting roles.  Thomas Newman delivers his first major orchestral score and knocks it out of the park with a potent combination of joyful mandolins, wistful woodwinds, and painfully resonant strings.

What I like most about Fried Green Tomatoes is that it’s a story about the power of storytelling.  There’s a ridiculous tall tale that gets told a few times throughout the movie, about some ducks that get frozen in a lake and fly off with it.  The story is representative of the movie as a whole, offering the only hope of immortality we can ever hope to achieve — that we can live forever through the people we love and the stories we tell them.