Even if the first words appearing on the screen didn't inform us that we're about to be ushered into the presence of "An All-Girl Production," there could be little doubt as to the exact nature of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Written and directed by Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise), produced by Bonnie Bruckheimer (Beaches) and adapted from a couple of Rebecca Wells novels much cherished by a sizable, almost exclusively female audience, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood arrives with a pedigree that qualifies it as pretty much the consummate chick flick. A consummate chick flick, but not a particularly good movie.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is part period piece, part female buddy pic, part psychodrama and part comedy, and that's only part of the reason it's so confused. The essence of this energetic but overlong, rambling movie has to do with a daughter's love-hate relationship with her mother, and, as with so many films that attempt to offer up what amounts to the lighter side of familial dysfunction, Ya-Ya can't quite seem to decide how it really feels about its subject. The movie spends the better part of two hours alternately skewering and romanticizing its central character — a self-centered, substance-abusing mother played as a young woman by Ashley Judd and as an aging matron by Ellen Burstyn — and then resolves all the complicated issues between the woman and her daughter in a final rush of unrepentant mush. If we hadn't already lost interest by this point, the last act would have had us howling at the screen in disbelief.
Sandra Bullock plays the long-suffering daughter Sidda, a successful Manhattan playwright whose off-the-cuff remarks about her mom in a national magazine spark the latest round in a lifelong battle of wills between the two women. An intervention of sorts ensues, with Sidda being kidnapped by the titular Ya-Yas — a trio of relentlessly colorful old biddies and mom's lifelong best chums — who transport her to some picturesque shack back home in Louisiana and force her to listen to endless stories about the life and times of Vivi, Sidda's grand and ghastly mom.
The film unfolds mostly in flashback, spanning some 60 years in the lives of Vivi and her circle of female friends. We see Vivi as a young girl who has issues with her own messed-up mother, then see the spunky girl growing into a spunky woman, finding and losing the great love of her life, and finally settling for a life with a good man she doesn't love and a brood of kids to whom she's a loving mom when she isn't being a hateful, booze-soaked bitch. Like most drama queens, Vivi is a jerk who's as charming as she is deeply neurotic, and the movie violently mood-swings between reveling in those neuroses and railing against them.
All of these flashback vignettes are apparently supposed to somehow justify or at least help explain the sins of the fathers — or sins of the mothers, as it were — and allow Sidda to come to terms with her beautiful monster of a mom. The portrait we're presented of Vivi never really comes into focus, though, and the whopper of a gap-closing, divine secret that the whole movie seems to be leading up to is, once revealed, barely a secret at all. The movie is an emotional cheat: The guilt-ridden mother and daughter blame each other publicly, while blaming themselves secretly, only to forget almost completely about decades of baggage.
What keeps the movie afloat are its performances, several extremely appealing. Particularly good among the Ya-Yas are the British Maggie Smith and Irish Fionnula Flanagan, offering up pitch-perfect Deep South accents and filling their eccentric, larger-than-life roles right up to the brim. It's always nice seeing classically trained hot-shot talents like Smith and Flanagan given a chance to bust out with some goofy, low-brow comedy moves, and Ya-Ya gives them plenty of opportunities to do just that, particularly in its first hour. Burstyn (who just keeps getting more beautiful as she ages) is also quite good; and Ashley Judd is appropriately fresh-faced, loopy or tortured, depending on the requirements of a given moment.
The men in the movie — and yes, there are men — are mostly window dressing, props to keep the plot bumping along from one point to the next. Ya-Ya Sisterhood isn't a particularly good movie, but it's at least interesting to see women presented as the preening peacocks for once, and men as the pale shadows they cast. Curiously, man-bashing is the furthest thing from the movie's agenda, with both of the resident males (a husband and a husband-to-be) being cast in what has all too often been the traditional role of women in art and in life: silent, steady anchors for their more spirited and ambitious "better" halves. Come to think of it, the men in Ya-Ya are so benign they barely register, and maybe that's the worst fate of all.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2002.
