Fried Green Tomatoes movie review (1992)

One of the reasons Jon Avnet's "Fried Green Tomatoes" survives the flashback structure is that it devises an interesting character to be the listener to the long-ago tale.

She is Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates), dowdy, unhappily married, dripping with low self-esteem, who during a visit to a nursing home meets a sparkling old lady named Miz Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy).

They start to talking, and before long Evelyn looks forward to her Wednesday visits, at which the old lady makes a continued story out of the sensational events of half a century ago in the town of Whistle Stop, GA.

You have been to Whistle Stop before, in a dozen other books and movies. It is one of those Southern towns where decent folks get along fine with the Negroes, but the racist rednecks are forever driving up in their pickups and waving shotguns around and causing trouble. In this case, one of the rednecks is the violent, drunken husband of a young woman named Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker). Ruth actually shouldn't have ought to married him in the first place, especially according to Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson), who wears pants and a tie and cuts her hair short and has a crush on Ruth.

The two women set up in business together as the Whistle Stop Cafe (breaded fried green tomatoes a specialty), with the help of Big George (Stan Shaw), a black man whose mother Sipsey (Cicely Tyson) raised Idgie. But when the women insist on serving Big George at the cafe, the local Klansmen get riled, and when Ruth's evil husband disappears and is assumed murdered, the lynch mob decides Big George was the killer.

Well, what did happen to the drunken lout? That is the payoff of old Miz Threadgoode's story. But the murder and even the subsequent trial are not really the subject of "Fried Green Tomatoes," which is really about nonconformity in an intolerant society. It's pretty clear that Idgie is a lesbian, and fairly clear that she and Ruth are a couple, although given the mores of the South at the time a lot goes unspoken, and we are never quite sure how clear that is to Ruth. It is also clear that they consider Sipsey and George better company than most of the white folks in town, and that, by deciding for themselves who they are and how they will lead their lives, Idgie and Ruth are a threat to the hidebound locals.