Festive Film Fare for Thanksgiving

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

STEEL MAGNOLIAS

Directed by Herbert Ross

Screenplay by Robert Harling

Men have hunting, ball games and bars -- plenty of opportunities to practice the hearty, necessary rituals of male bonding. Feminist theory and common sense tell us that women have a similar need to renew gender loyalties. Their problem, traditionally, has been finding suitable places and occasions to do so.

It was observant of playwright Robert Harling to see that a small-town beauty parlor can function as a little lodge hall for women, a place where they can let their hair down while it is being put up. It was clever of him to stock Steel Magnolias with Southern belles, wicked of eye and tongue, though ultimately forgiving of heart. It was shrewd of him to work his successful off-Broadway drama around personal milestones (marriage, birth, death) that everyone shares. His characters may be exotics, but their situations are achingly familiar.

Above all, it was brave of Harling to place at the center of what might otherwise have been an episodic comedy the true, tragic story of his sister, a diabetic who doomed herself to early death in order to bear a child, and his mother's struggle to come to terms with that choice. It gives the piece the dramatic focus and the emotional weight it requires.

The play was a swell show; it had something for everyone. The main thing preventing it from being an equally swell movie is the fact that it is a movie. A film must offer us something a little more spectacular than half a dozen white chicks sitting around talking. Accordingly, Harling's adaptation hustles them out of the beauty shop and into the life of the town. Suddenly the people they talked about so amusingly behind their backs must be met face- to-face. The conflicts and confusions that sounded so hilarious in the recounting are spread out realistically. And reality, as we know, is never that amusing when confronted head on.

The stylized bitchiness of Harling's writing requires a stage setting. Failing that, it requires a director willing to let his actors throw good lines away or overlap them in ways that work in the movie's naturalistic context. But Herbert Ross insists on theatricality. His editing even provides awkward little pauses for the audience to fill with laughter, just as if this were still a play. As a result, some very good performers (Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, Daryl Hannah, Dolly Parton) function less as full-scale sorority sisters than as chorus members who elbow their way up front in a crowd of even sketchier characters.

The film's center lies in the bond between Julia Roberts as the young woman serenely accepting the risk of childbirth and Sally Field as her tightly wound mother, wanting to scream warnings at her daughter but only able to whisper despairing support for her -- right through the final coma. Their characters are fully and finely realized, and their work is supported, not subverted, by the style and mood of a film that cries more easily, and more persuasively, than it laughs.