80%
Delicious slice of Southern Gothic, but without Tennessee WILLIAMS’ underlying, morbidly-homosexual sensibility that reflects a less repressed and more positive outlook on life’s pleasures. A paean to the benefits and joys of miscegenation that is deliberately designed to irritate and annoy White supremacists.
Screenwriter Anne RAPP really knows how to recreate a community life she must be readily familiar with, as the slow aggregation of details deliberately mounts up with the deft strokes of her efficient pen. Her theme is essentially misplaced family pride that kills the thing it tries to protect by trying too hard to conceal family secrets that are already well-known. It is just that people have enough self-respect and common courtesy not to mention them. Nevertheless, it is the knowledge that other people know of these things that is so frightening and leads to the self destructive behavior on show here.
The cultural and political snobbery the screenwriter successfully lampoons is of the particularly vicious kind that destroys lives in the errant belief that reputations for being perfect are more important than ordinary human reality; leading to self-destructive one-upmanship.
This is the kind of warm writing that attracts good actors to work for little money to show off their skills for the sheer hell of making movies. And hopefully ones that will be remembered long after the well-paid crap is long forgotten.
The ensemble cast are all excellent, since director Robert Altman usually chooses his performers well. For once, Liv TYLER is a believably-spunky tomboy and not just her usual piece of set decoration; while the sisters played by Julianne MOORE and Glenn CLOSE not-so-secretly loathe each other a la Bette DAVIS and Joan CRAWFORD in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
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