So this film deals with a small group of close knit friends as they deal with various things happening, like weddings and pregnancies and other things like that. It’s very much a ‘slice of life’ film in that it just depicts mostly ordinary events without any great plot twists or shocks or surprises. It has a pretty impressive cast, boasting Julia Roberts, Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis and Dolly Parton among its performers.
Steel Magnolias is a decent film. It’s an inoffensive film that’s easy to watch and it meanders along at a gentle pace. It’s basically a movie that could easily be made by a national broadcaster and shown in the afternoon. It’s the same type of story as those things, but with better actors. The film is pretty sweet in places and I mean that it actually feels sugary. At points it does feel like it’s a film trying to depict real life, so I found that I couldn’t properly immerse myself in the story and because of this the emotional moments failed to have their intended impact. The problem I have with these types of films is that they show these people’s lives and it doesn’t give me any real reason to be interested in them beyond the fact that the movie was made. I didn’t feel that there was much depth and all the characters were quite broadly defined, it was just that the caliber of the actors was good enough that they were all able to elevate the film beyond the vanilla feel of the script.
Nothing that happened was particularly surprising and its definitely not a film that will shake you to your emotional core. There are some really funny lines and the script is quite sharp in places but overall I feel that it’s the actors that make this film watchable rather than the story itself.
Having said that I don’t actually dislike this film. Although I wasn’t moved by it or really affected by it in any way I wasn’t bored either, and there wasn’t anything I particularly disliked about it. Vanilla is a good way to describe this I think. It’s very easy to watch, there are some good performances and some funny lines. It’s not anything groundbreaking but it’s not dull. I don’t think it’s for everyone and really if you hear the synopsis of, ‘a bunch of women deal with marriages, pregnancies and other little dramas,’ and it doesn’t appeal to you then don’t bother watching it because it never goes beyond that description. But it is what it is, and it’s pretty decent.