Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Steel Magnolias Blu-ray Movie Review

A field day for Sally and the rest of the cast.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 11, 2012

Films featuring a predominantly female ensemble cast have had a fairly spotty history. There were a number of high profile such outings in the 1930s, including the original The Women, the paradigm of such distaff heavy efforts, and Stage Door, though the latter film has become indelibly linked with Katharine Hepburn’s famous line about calla lilies being in bloom again and is therefore more prone to be remembered as grist for the mill of impersonators than for any intrinsic worth. While there continued to be many gyno-centric films in the intervening decades, including everything from The Group to more recent outings like Waiting to Exhale or those two “sisterhood” films, Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, probably one of the most beloved films in this subgenre would be 1989’s tearjerker Steel Magnolias, a movie which brought together a cast of (then) all-stars and soon-to-be stars in a touching if often hackneyed look at a semi-modern take on Southern Belles. Based on a play by Robert Harling, which was itself a sort of female version of Barber Shop, with a bunch of women gossiping in a low rent beauty parlor, Steel Magnolias reunited director Herbert Ross with his Turning Point star Shirley MacLaine, and brought along Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis, Dolly Parton, Darryl Hannah and then relative newcomer Julia Roberts to boot. Sometimes unfairly (and even inexplicably) lumped in with a film which came two years later, Fried Green Tomatoes, Steel Magnolias is unabashedly old fashioned, even as it portends to shine a new light on the vaunted southern woman, a creature who according to the film title’s central metaphor is as fragrantly soft and alluring as a radiant flower but who also has the fortitude of molten metal to get her through life’s trials and tribulations.

Steel Magnolias manages to create several interlocking storylines, in the best tradition of ensemble pieces, but its main focus is on harried (and worried) mom M’Lynn (Sally Field), whose headstrong daughter Shelby (Julia Roberts) is about to have an Easter wedding to local attorney Jackson (Dylan McDermott). M’Lynn is a regular customer at Truvy’s beauty parlor, a little homegrown enterprise run by, well, Truvy (Dolly Parton). Truvy has just hired a dowdy young woman named Annelle (Daryl Hannah), a new transplant to Chinqaupin Parish in Louisiana, is kind of a klutz but is obviously well meaning and eager to learn. The older generation is represented by local doyennes Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine), who is frequently seen being tugged around the town by her gigantic dog, and Clairee (Olympia Dukakis), a kind of patrician elder who is thinking of buying the local radio station so that she can make it play songs she likes.

The men in Steel Magnolias frankly feel like an afterthought and are nowhere near as well developed as the female characters. Truvy’s husband Spud (no, I’m not kidding) (Sam Shephard) is kind of a wastrel and is chronically unemployed, while her son Louie is, shall we say, lacking in even basic social graces. Meanwhile M’Lynn’s husband Drum (no, I’m not kidding) (Tom Skerritt) is alienating the entire neighborhood by repeatedly firing a gun to scare off the birds from his backyard trees before Shelby’s big day. That leaves only Jackson, Shelby’s fiancé and then husband, and to a lesser extent a couple of potential beaus for some of the women as examples of southern masculinity in anything even slightly more than two dimensions, but even these attempts fall (not to pun horribly) mostly flat. Harling has an ear and a feel for his women, and that is squarely where Steel Magnolias finds its inner strength as well as its delicacy.

Though Harling’s original play has been rather smartly opened up well beyond the confines of Truvy’s Beauty Parlor, there’s still an incipient theatricality that hangs on the film and occasionally weakens its emotional content. Harling could have fashioned a career as a sitcom writer, at least with regard to southern fried shows like Designing Women, for he certainly has an ear for the dialect and the tendency to gossip (sometimes, but not always, rather maliciously). He sets up several great one liners, but the laughs aren’t especially geared toward helping us understand the characters better. In that regard, Harling does much better when the film veers awfully close to three-hankie territory after Shelby’s diabetes wreaks havoc with her health, especially after she becomes pregnant. It’s at this moment, when the film lurches rather unsteadily from a sort of “dramedy” feel to something decidedly more serious, that there is some actual emotional heft and Steel Magnolias manages to rise above its “women’s picture” ethos to deliver a surprising amount of genuine feeling.

Steel Magnolias Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Steel Magnolias is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Twilight Time with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This continues Twilight Time's exceptional track record, especially with regard to the Columbia (in this case Tri-Star) catalog titles it has been licensing. While the film has a pretty standard 80's film stock look to it, the image is nicely crisp and very well detailed and the transfer benefits from the elements being in very good condition. Colors are beautifully saturated, though I personally found flesh tones occasionally on the ruddy side and the greens to be slightly florid. Director Herbert Ross and cinematographer John A. Alonzo capture a lot of the small town charm that is at the heart of the story, and the location photography here offers some nice depth of field with good contrast that captures the sun glinted pleasures of the American South. Midrange shots tend to offer some relative softness but the bulk of the film consists of a stable and very clean and clear looking image, and the film's many fans should be extremely well pleased with the results on display here.

Steel Magnolias Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Steel Magnolias' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track may not be an immersive sonic showcase, but this very well wrought mix offers some beautifully nuanced aural pleasures that nicely recreate the small town ambience of the piece. Things actually get off to a pretty boisterous start as Drum is running around shooting at birds, offering some nice LFE in spurts. The chaotic plans for the wedding in M'Lynn's household are also nicely splayed through the surrounds, a tendency that continues in several group scenes, including a very nicely done Christmas party about halfway through the film. The rest of the mix depends largely on Georges Delerue's charming score for surround activity, and the sweeping string cues nicely underpin several key sequences. Fidelity is very strong and all dialogue is easily heard. This Twilight Time release does offer optional English SDH subtitles.

Steel Magnolias Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Isolated Score. Georges Delerue's charming and surprisingly "Americana" tinged score is presented via DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. Full of gentle, Coplandesque string cues, this is one of Delerue's most consistently melodic (if admittedly occasionally cloying) pieces. Delerue never really seemed to erupt into the top tier of American film composers, but he has a number of top flight scores to his credit. While he won an Oscar for A Little Romance, I personally highly recommend his sumptuous work on the historical epic Anne of the Thousand Days (a film which would look and sound spectacular on Blu-ray, I might add).


• Audio Commentary. Director Herbert Ross contributes a soft spoken but highly articulate and informative commentary that gets into some of the nuts and bolts of the filmmaking process as well as the adaptive efforts that were needed to morph Harling's stage play into a workable film property.

Steel Magnolias Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Steel Magnolias can't quite escape its stage bound roots and it also doesn't try very hard to rise above a typical setup and punchline format for a lot of its humor. But about halfway through this film, things start to change, and while some may fault the film for being overly melodramatic, there's no denying the immediacy of the relationships and how well the all star cast brings them to life, especially Sally Field, who brings her typical grit and vulnerability to her role. The film's "circle of life" structure may indeed be cliché ridden and hackneyed, but under Ross' assured direction, it's surprisingly moving. This isn't a great film but it's a very, very enjoyable one, one highlighted by some fantastic ensemble work by a very notable group of excellent female performers. This Twilight Time release offers great looking video and nice sounding audio, and unlike some other Twilight Time releases, this one comes with more than just an isolated score as a supplement. Recommended.