Violets Are Blue movie review (1986)

Henry's father dies, and he takes over the family business - the little local newspaper in the Maryland coastal resort where he lives.

He gets married and has a son. Gussie gets her wings, starts taking photos for the airline's in-flight magazine and eventually becomes a world-famous photographer. Then one summer, 15 years later, she comes home for a vacation.

It is inevitable that they will meet again. In fact, their eyes meet across a long distance during a local boat race. Gussie goes down to the newspaper office to see Henry again, and there is an immediate tension in the air between them, a realization that in one way or another they are going to have to deal with some unfinished business.

Henry invites Gussie over to his house for dinner. Henry's wife Ruth (Bonnie Bedelia) does her best to keep the atmosphere light, and their son Addy (Jim Standiford) asks lots of questions about Gussie's work. But things grow more and more awkward, until it becomes clear that Gussie will have to leave early - that she and Henry have an agenda that does not include his family.

This is a difficult scene handled with quiet confidence by director Jack Fisk. Compare it to a scene that was handled badly in the recent "Just Between Friends," where everything leads up to the embarrassing dinner table confrontation and then the movie chickens out and never shows us what happens.

"Violets Are Blue" establishes its events within a vivid sense of time and place. We get a real feel for the close-knit seaside community, where Gussie's father (John Kellogg) operates the bumper cars and lives in a frame house just down the street. Everybody knows everybody else's business in this town, and her father tells Gussie one day, with gruffness and love, that she has no business fooling around with a married man. But Gussie can't help herself. She chose a career instead of a family, but now she has seen the man who could have been her husband, seen the boy who could have been her son, and she wants it both ways.