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Is it goes for so many frame stories, the one in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) feels gradually more pointless the more emotionally invested we get in the narrative it decorates. And we get invested in the latter so quickly that we’ve just barely finished the first act of the movie before we’re already groaning about having to again sit through the dramas of the characters we started off with. They are Evelyn (Kathy Bates), a meek and dissatisfied middle-aged housewife, and a sunny elderly woman who calls herself Ninny (Jessica Tandy). They meet while Evelyn and her husband, Ed (Gailard Sartain), are visiting his aunt in the nursing home where Ninny lives; Evelyn and Ninny get to talking after the former is politely booted out of her aunt-in-law’s room and has to kill time in the common space, where she lends an ear to Ninny’s stories of the past. 

One keeps her — and before long us audience members — rapt for several days. Ninny takes us back a few generations to explore the decades-long friendship (really more a mutually unadmitted romance) between Ninny’s sister-in-law, Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson), and Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker), the onetime girlfriend of Idgie’s tragically killed brother (Chris O’Connell). Their escapades weave in and out of Evelyn’s own life, where she’s trying to save her stale marriage by attending what amount to marriage-improvement seminars and in general find purpose. Everything climaxes with the murder of Ruth’s abusive husband, whose circumstances are not cleared up until the end of the film. (They nonetheless lead to some protracted courtroom drama anyway.)

The stuff with Idgie and Ruth can be treacly. It’s also where Fried Green Tomatoes’ relationship to race is most obviously fraught, with any Black characters in their orbit (the primary ones are played by Cicely Tyson and Stan Shaw) only ever allowed to be quiet, obsequious friends and then objects through which white characters can prove their progressive goodness in moments where racial bigotry in the small Southern town where the flashbacks are set flare up. 

It’s hard not to get invested in Idgie and Ruth’s friendship anyway; it’s the most enduringly positive thing about both their lives. Parker and Masterson are affable and have easy chemistry; though the movie’s been criticized for keeping their obvious love for each other subtextual, I think the lack of confirmation, with both characters never quite able to express their true feelings to each other, only adds to the bittersweetness the movie effectively cultivates. It’s appreciative of the bond they nevertheless were able to forge but mournful that it never was able to become more than what it was because of the time, the circumstances, and what Idgie and Ruth weren’t willing to admit about themselves. 

Because Fried Green Tomatoes exclusively operates in broad strokes, it’s only natural there come to be minutiae you’re hungry for it to explore that it never does much with. There’s Ruth’s relationship with her young son, who loses his arm in an accident that eerily resembles her late childhood boyfriend’s. There’s also Ninny’s own relationship with Idgie and the town in which she built her life in general. (She’s mostly only a spirited angel-like figure prone to doing things like dying her hair purple; it’s the kind of laugh line-heavy, open-hearted performance the Academy loves and unsurprisingly nodded.) But the movie’s genuine warmth toward its characters and the stories it tells — the film, directed by Jon Avnet and written by Fannie Flagg and Carol Sobieski, is an adaptation of Flagg’s book, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe — makes up for most, though hardly all, of its flaws.