2002 rewatch: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood needed more Ya-Yas

Every week, Entertainment Weekly is looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002. As audiences struggled to understand the new post-9/11 world order, Hollywood found itself in a moment of transition, with upcoming stars and soon-to-be-forever franchises playing alongside startling new visions and fading remnants of the old normal. Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood's strange new millennium. This Week: EW critics Leah Greenblatt and Darren Franich close the book on the summer's big literary adaptation, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Last Week: Several great actors and also young Ben Affleck ponder The Sum of All Fears. Next Week: Watch out for sharp pens when you investigate The Bourne Identity.

Leah: Okay Darren, let's get our Ya-Yas out: this is a real mixed bag of a movie, and I cannot say I love it. But I can appreciate it as a pretty loony artifact of Hollywood's Southern Belle Industrial Complex, which peaked at least two decades ago but never really died (if the coming arrival of Where The Crawdads Sing tells us anything). It's hard to fully nail down as a genre, but movies like this are what you might get if you injected Tennessee Williams with some core Real Housewives DNA, then dunked it all in one of those wine-mom sketches from Saturday Night Live and maybe threw either a hapless Tom Skerritt or James Garner in the mix.

Anyway, Sisterhood is based on the bestselling books by Rebecca Wells and written and directed by Callie Khouri, who has an absolutely deserved Oscar for her Thelma & Louise screenplay and two People's Choice Awards nods for Nashville, her dearly departed nighttime soap. Here, she begins with the vaguely hilarious premise that a Time magazine reporter finds it fascinating to stand by while a New York playwright named Siddalee Walker (Sandra Bullock) waxes and wanes on the various emotional quirks of her Louisiana mother, Viviane (Ellen Burstyn). Not only that, the reporter makes it the crux of her ensuing profile, and Vivi takes the vapors so hard when she reads it that the prodigal daughter must return home and make it right. Or more specifically, she is roofied(!) and kidnapped, by a blood-bound clan of hard-Chardonnaying seniors that includes Shirley Knight, Fionnula Flanagan, and Dame Maggie Smith — whose sticky Creole accent is on point, but still feels so deeply weird coming from the Dowager Countess.

And I haven't even gotten to the flashbacks yet! Or the wild ascendancy of Ashley Judd, who plays young Vivi, as one of the lady movie stars of this era. But I feel like you may have thoughts about that.

Darren: What you're describing is a genre of pure atmosphere, I think: Bourbon on the deck, glorious belles gone bad. It's the clash between restrained manners and hot nights so sweaty that some Ya-Yas just gotta rip their clothes right off. There's usually an embedded fantasy in these stories — here are all the boozy, brawl-y, foulmouthed, and stridently anti-racist Southerners — but who goes to summer movies for neo-realism? Every house I visited in the late '90s had Ya-Ya somewhere on the bookshelf, so I recall serious anticipation for Khouri's adaptation. It felt like counter-programming, right between the Good Will Hunting guys' respective spy movies, and it actually did decently well at the box office (back when "decently well at the box office" was a middle-class possibility between "billion-dollar grossing megafranchise launchpad" and "studio-sinking flop").

And oh, the flashbacks, Leah. I never read Wells' books, but I feel Khouri struggling to wedge fabulous incidents across sixty-some years into a two hour runtime. Was there an embarrassment of riches? Bullock was a huge star, Judd was a very big star, and Burstyn was coming off a sixth Oscar nomination for Requiem for a Dream. The opening scene presents the origin story of the Ya-Yas, a gumbo-pagan kid-matriarchy with incantations about "the wolf people, the alligator people, and the moon men." Hell, that's a movie. But then Judd takes over as Vivi from the teen years through adulthood, life cycles reduced to sketches of abuse and loss. Cherry Jones pops in for a brief moment as Vivi's mother, a semi-gorgon who seems deeply terrorized by Vivi's father (David Rasche). That sequence stretches for full melodrama — "You pathetic Catholic idiot!" — but then there's still so much to cover with Vivi's own romantic loss, and her struggles through housewifery, multi-child parenting, and a prescription-drug breakdown. Judd has a couple standout moments, but it often feels like she's performing re-enactments more than scenes. That's because the present-day stuff with Bullock is a bookend that never ends, as the kidnapped Siddalee listens to various Ya-Yas tee up flashbacks about why mama wasn't that bad.

Khouri was a pioneering feminist voice in a vastly bro-ier Hollywood, but I honestly wonder if Ya-Ya suffers a bit from turn-of-the-century rom-com necessities. There's a lot of time spent with Connor (Angus Macfadyen), Sidda's patient fiancé, and Macfadyen is fine as a type of character I hate, hate, hate: The Nice Guy Waiting For The Kooky Dame To De-Kookify Herself. The late great James Garner makes a more humane impression as Vivi's genial husband, but you sense the film's attention wandering. There's not enough Ya-Ya in this Ya-Ya. The younger versions of Vivi's friends make zero impression. In the present day, definable character traits basically come down to who's sober (Flanagan) and who's not (Smith).

A bit of focus may have helped — and focus is always the trickiest thing to pull off when you're adapting a bestseller. Leah, were there strands of the movie that definably worked better or worse for you? Is it bad that I think Bullock's role could've been, like, cut down to a prologue and and epilogue?

Leah: Oh Darren, I wish you were running the studio back in 2002; you could have been Warner Brothers' Doogie Howser, story M.D. (Though the movie was co-produced, interestingly, by Bette Midler and Bonnie Bruckheimer, the former spouse of Adrenaline King Jerry, so the counter-programming you speak of is real.) Controversially, I don't think this movie needs Bullock at all, or at least not the Harried '90s Career Gal she's playing (still!) in 2002; why not recast her as one of the younger Ya-Yas and flesh out that whole storyline instead?

Because you're right, the other women hardly exist in these flashbacks other than as props in party dresses who look on concernedly at Judd's Vivi as she flails and spins and dances and wails, buffeted by cruel fate and cocktails. We never get a real sense of why she loves her doomed Jack (Matthew Settle) so deeply, or why James Garner's Shep — whose WWII version (David Lee Smith) is arguably even more generically brunette-dreamy — is such an egregious and terrible substitute when Jack dies/disappears (unresolved?) that she must turn her entire soul over to demon alcohol.

I too was intrigued by the gothic telenovela of Vivi's parents, who seem like a far likelier cause of her unhinged misery than poor Jack, and I wish in general that the script had spent more time on specifics and less on the sweep — an inevitable product, maybe, of combining not one but two of Wells' books in under two hours of film. Bullock has always been so good at portraying a kind of smart, messy, self-aware Everywoman whose charm is in her imperfections, but here she's mostly just left to play obnoxious or confused (or you know, Rohypnoled). I'm not sure why this movie works so much less well for me than Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatoes or various other entries in the sweet-tea-and-repressed-trauma category. I love an ensemble! Give me ladies in day hats with drinking problems all day long, yelling at their bemused and thematically underdeveloped husbands.

The signature of the genre is too-muchness, though, and Ya-Ya surely has the most of everything (melodrama, Oscar-y actresses, vats of wine); it suffers for its riches, and so must we. But Darren we've been doing these flashbacks for a while now, and it's interesting to see what does and doesn't hold up to our 2022 snobbery. Are we being unfair to a movie that was so much a product of its time? Is there a Ya-Ya that makes sense to you in 2022? Or is that what Crawdads is, basically?

Darren: I'll see your Crawdads, Leah, and raise you some Sharp Objects. I didn't even like all of HBO's 2018 miniseries, but I loved every isolated minute of Patricia Clarkson swanning boozily around her porch. As a pair, those two projects are much bleaker than Ya-Ya's sunny swirl. 2011's The Help may have marked a mainstream turning point, unsurfacing all the racial politics in a genre full of fancy white ladies with diligent Black maids. (Hell, The Help so affected the zeitgeist that it successfully rendered itself helplessly out of date.)

It's notable, I think, Judd's at her best when Vivi flees domestic terror (all the kids are vomiting and pooping!!) for a quietly tense coastal retreat. That's the one sequence where Khouri's busy direction slows down, and there's a thirty-second mirror close-up on Judd, her face shaded with regret, rage, sorrow, humor, and some deep resolve. It's a primal moment, in a film working overtime for nostalgic guffaws.

That said, I think the main thing missing in this movie is that sense of an ensemble. Steel Magnolias still thrills because it just keeps throwing all its women together. Great performers playing outrageous characters with massive personalities: This ain't rocket science. Yet I worry that even in 2002, stuff like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes (both big hits!) seemed too non-conceptual, plotless, even a bit indie. So Ya-Ya overloads itself in the wrong way, with a lot of big moments but precious few opportunities for the cast to really engage with each other. Forced whimsy, empty characters, zero tension? Nah-nah.

Read past 2002 rewatches:

• The Sum of All Fears was somehow too late and too early
• Insomnia was a flawed but promising daylight noir from pre-Batman Christopher Nolan
• Star Wars: Episode 2—Attack of the Clones is still fascinating and confusing
• Unfaithful brought sex to the summer
• Spider-Man still swings high one multiverse later