The knee belongs to Emma Rae King (Kyra Sedgwick), the groin is her brother-in-law Eddie’s (Dennis Quaid) and the kick is an expression of solidarity with her sister Grace King Bichon (Julia Roberts), who’s just discovered her husband’s infidelity. Even before she uncovers the affair, Grace is frayed at the edges. Every time she drives off to an appointment, she forgets she’s left her 10-year-old daughter behind.
Now, confronted with Eddie’s philandering, something snaps in Grace, and she loses her tolerance for keeping up appearances. First she scandalizes her women’s charity group. Then, moving back to the family manse, she troubles the waters with rude truths, setting off a chain reaction of pain and lunacy. Her rich, autocratic horse-breeding Daddy (Robert Duvall) fears that her marital woes will blow a real-estate deal with Eddie’s father. Her mother (Gena Rowlands), oozing discreet Southern charm, urges her to forgive her husband and reconcile. Her dotty aunt recommends giving him a dose of poison–or “homeopathic aversion therapy,” as she calls it.
The movie eventually boils down to one of the oldest romantic-comedy questions in the book: will husband and wife find a way to rekindle their lost love? This may disappoint some viewers expecting a more radical turn of events. But Khouri and director Lasse Hallstrom (“My Life as a Dog,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”) invigorate a conventional form with texture, warmth and a tangy feminist sensibility. Try to imagine a cross between Mary Chapin Carpenter and Philip (“The Philadelphia Story”) Barry and you’ll get an inkling of the movie’s old bottle/new wine charm.
It may seem odd to entrust a Southern tale to the Swedish Hallstrom, but it was smart. Hallstrom hasn’t acquired the bad Hollywood habit of hyping his material–he keeps the emotions honest, lets our sympathies ebb and flow between the characters in a scene. Grace is no saint, and Eddie more than a sinner. It’s nice to see Roberts working with good material again, showing she can be both a star and a fine team player. From top to bottom, she’s working with a thoroughbred ensemble. Sedgwick’s blunt, ribald, Emma Rae is the crowd-pleasing part. Hers are the lines everyone will be quoting–raunchy enough to earn the movie an inappropriate R rating. What’s refreshing, though, is that sooner or later every character, man or woman, gets his due. The humanity is spread around with a quirky, generous hand, reason enough to distinguish this quiet, low-tech comedy in a season of big-bang juvenilia.
title: “Southern Discomfort” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-15” author: “Russell Porter”
What you won’t see at the Games next month is the other side of the sun belt. It’s Beatrice Carlisle’s universe, and it begins and ends on Bates Mill Road in Greensboro, Ala. There, one night a few weeks ago, fire broke out in the Rising Star Missionary Baptist Church not far from her tiny red-brick house. Peering out her window, through a clump of trees, she saw flames. ““Oh, Lord,’’ the 79-year-old stammered in the vernacular of elderly black folks in rural west Alabama, ““us church is burning down.''
In Atlanta (the self-styled ““capital of the New South’’), the color of the old Confederacy is not black or white but green. In the not-too-distant provinces like Greensboro (the self-styled ““catfish capital of the South’’) lies a different country: poorer, more isolated – and now on edge. It’s clear that despite Atlanta’s profitable civil-rights spin, race still matters deeply in the South.
It matters everywhere else, too, of course, and for Southerners confronting the latest fires, that’s the damnable thing. For all its dark and peculiar history, from the assault on Fort Sumter to the beatings at Selma, the South has come far since World War II. Abolishing Jim Crow took much too long, but race in America is not a distinctively Southern problem. (None of the five most segregated metro areas in the country, for example, is in the South, and two of the most integrated – Fayetteville, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla. – are.) ““These fires confirm the country’s assumption that we’re the worst of the lot,’’ says John Egerton, a Nashville historian. ““So even if people do burn down L.A. or trash the Bronx or come to blows in Boston, they can still tell themselves they’re better than the crackers down South.''
For now, most of the ““crackers,’’ whether their sympathies lie with Bull Connor or Atticus Finch, are perplexed. The recent outbreaks would make more sense if extremists were riled up over a clear cause, like preserving legalized segregation. But today’s cutting racial issue – affirmative action – is a middle-class controversy seemingly far removed from the impoverished regions where the bombings are taking place. Which leaves us with honky-tonk terrorists careering around the countryside, mindlessly obsessed with race and evoking memories of genuinely divisive days. ““The past is never dead,’’ William Faulkner once wrote. ““It isn’t even past.''
In the South, it is palpably alive on the land, in church and in the heart. First, consider geography: the old Confederacy is the only place in the country with high concentrations of rural blacks. The invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the mid-1940s fundamentally changed farming, provoking the great black migration from cotton country to big cities. Five million African-Americans left rural farms after 1940; it was, according to the author Nicholas Lemann, ““one of the largest and most rapid internal movements of people in history.’’ But even now, decades after the migration, half of the nation’s blacks are still in the South, and nearly two thirds of those live outside cities.
They are people like Selma Cole, an 85-year-old widow who has spent most of her life near Denmark, Tenn. She can remember when her beloved Johnson Grove Baptist Church would draw 150 people: ““It was thickly populated when I married back in ‘27,’’ she says. ““A lot of sharecroppers lived down around here.’’ Then church membership dwindled to 50. The road that ran by the church was never paved, and the town didn’t grow. So by the time arsonists burned Johnson Grove in January of last year, the small frame sanctuary was a lonely outpost at the end of a gravel trail.
The South remains the nation’s churchiest region, a place where STUCKEY’S and SEE ROCK CITY signs compete for highway space with hand-painted JOHN 3:16 placards. So churches are more than a natural symbolic target; with precious few other rural black institutions, it would be difficult to find anything to hit but a sanctuary. And the isolation of these churches may be, in part, why it took so long for the recent fires to percolate to press and presidential attention. The torched houses of worship are not those of the black elite. They are the places where their distant, poorer and less influential kin might worship.
For these blacks, church is often the very center of their lives. Outside Ladonia, Texas, after the whitewood chapel of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist disintegrated to ash, 71-year-old Inez Edwards was immediately disoriented. ““I don’t know any other church,’’ she says. ““I felt like I had lost someone from my family.’’ ““The church is the heartbeat of any black community,’’ says Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil-rights veteran who grew up in rural Alabama. ““It’s where you get singing, preaching – and the latest gossip.’'
In the Movement days, you could get much more. Though King and his allies led from upper-middle-class pulpits in cities like Montgomery, the grass-roots work of voter registration came in out-of-the-way sanctuaries. So at least the bombings of the ’50s and ’60s had a perverse logic: segregationists were convinced they were in a war, and striking black churches was a clear blow at the enemy.
So far, today’s attacks seem to have less to do with well-funded conspiracies and more to do with inchoate racism. No one has yet died in the recent fires, and the current climate little resembles the terror of lynchings and beatings and bombs tossed into churches full of people. Instead, the new troubles appear to come when rural whites, emboldened by liquor and real or imagined grievances, go nightriding.
Robert Lee Johnson and Marc and Michael Jett, white, countrified Tennesseans, are probably typical. On Super Bowl Sunday 1995, the three high-school dropouts were sitting around rural Maury County, drinking beer and popping Valium. The talk turned to money Johnson had lost playing dice at Sweetie Petie’s, a local black-owned tavern; the three then set out to burn two churches – which they did, ultimately pleading guilty to federal civil-rights charges. This kind of violence rises out of an old dynamic: the worse off whites are, the more they take out their frustrations on minorities, the only people around the poor whites can look down on.
But the Old South is far from making a successful second stand. One night last week near Fruitland, Tenn., a white man named George Selph saw a local TV report on the reconstruction of Salem Baptist Church, which had burned just after Christmas. First thing the next morning, the 67-year-old loaded up his old maroon cooler with ice and soft drinks and lugged it out to the volunteers working in Salem’s ruins. ““I would dearly love to be on the jury trying the folks who did this,’’ says Selph. For the South – Old or New – that’s progress.
title: “Southern Discomfort” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Paul Buzis”
Beasley was either being courageous–or suicidal. In South Carolina, one of the most conservative states in the land, three fourths of Republican voters told pollsters that the rebel banner should keep flying from the dome in 1994, the last time someone tried to move it. As a candidate and as governor, Beasley, who was elected two years ago with critical support from the Christian Coalition, repeatedly agreed. Why change sides now? The answer has less to do with ideology than commerce. The flag, and its uncomfortable connotations, belongs to the Old South. Beasley wants to keep the state securely positioned in the booming sun belt–and looking like the Cracker Capital of America is bad for business.
The governor, a born-again Baptist, first told reporters the idea to remove the flag came to him in late October, when he woke up one morning at 3 to read the Bible and pray. Later, he became vaguer about his moment of truth. “It was a series of things,” he told NEWSWEEK. He wouldn’t be more specific, but the relevant chain of events began with Susan Smith of Union, S.C. She drowned her two young sons in 1994–but misled the police for several days with the claim that a black man had kidnapped her children. Then there was a deeply embarrassing string of ’60s-style racial flare-ups. First came the opening of the nation’s only Ku Klux Klan museum and gift shop last winter in Laurens, S.C. Then the state led the nation in the recent wave of church burnings (13 of 32 total). When President Clinton needed to fly somewhere to show his concern, he came here. And in late October, two Klansmen fresh from a pro-Confederate flag rally sprayed a black nightclub in Pelion, S.C., with bullets, wounding three teenagers.
And so powerful local elites have decided that the bottom line is more important than the Lost Cause. South Carolina has aggressively competed in the South Atlantic jobs sweepstakes since the 1970s, recruiting BMW’s first U.S. assembly plant (a $1 billion investment in 1992) and more than 500 other foreign-owned factories. But lately, too many unflattering stories by outsiders have noted the battle flag’s spot on the capitol roof–including one last month in Der Spiegel, the influential German weekly. “Other places have church burnings,” says Hunter Howard, president of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, “but the flag gives the world the impression that we condone those episodes.” The chamber–and the Palmetto Business Forum, a group of 35 top CEOs–has backed Beasley’s plan. One reason: new investment is off 50 percent in the state’s five-county central region in 1996–down from $520 million and 4,200 jobs last year.
The future toll could be higher. At a conference sponsored by the National Council of Churches in October, black leaders called for a national march against racism in South Carolina early in 1997. Five former governors, from Strom Thurmond (1946-50) to Carroll Campbell (1986-94), lined up to support Beasley. But a bloody punch-up in his own party, and a 1998 primary challenge, are guaranteed–even though his proposal, which must pass the legislature, would move the banner to a prominent spot near the steps of the statehouse. “The Confederate flag did not burn those churches,” said Attorney General Charlie Condon. Condon’s argument is a popular one: though South Carolina is more than a third African-American, 40 percent of all its residents think the banner still belongs atop the dome. Many are too young to remember that the battle flag first appeared above the statehouse in 1962–mainly as a gesture of defiance against the civil-rights movement. “We should never sacrifice our principles for money,” Condon said. That’s the kind of latter-day defiance the governor and his friends are aiming to defeat.
title: “Southern Discomfort” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-31” author: “Edith Dennis”
If only one could say that about Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The fans who have kept John Berendt’s nonfiction tale on the best-seller list for more than three years may come away feeling they’ve seen ““Perry Mason’’ on Valium. Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock faced a knotty problem of adaptation: what’s beguiling about the book isn’t the unsatisfying murder-mystery plot but the supremely odd cast of characters, the drenched-in-decadence atmosphere, the evocation of a community blissfully insulated from the mundane. Perhaps this could have been captured in a leisurely mini-series (the PBS ““Tales of the City’’ offers a model). Eastwood’s strangely lackluster 2-hour, 35-minute version feels both too long for a tensionless courtroom drama and too short to do justice to its characters.
Much of the casting, however, is dead on. Kevin Spacey’s creepy, deadeyed gentility fits the nouveau riche antiques dealer Williams like a velvet glove; Jack Thompson seems born to play the heartily charming attorney Sonny Seiler, and Cusack has the right mix of irony and intelligence to play the authorial stand-in (who has been given a lame, unnecessary romantic involvement with Alison Eastwood’s colorless Mandy). One of the true treats is getting to see The Lady Chablis play her transvestite self: her salty drag-queen energy is an always-welcome distraction. Chablis gets to shine in the movie’s one surefire scene, when she leeringly misbehaves at a black debutante ball. Irma T. Hall’s voodoo priestess Minerva fares less well: Eastwood’s depictions of her occult cemetery rituals are hopelessly stagy.
The one crucial miscasting is Eastwood as director. He approaches the story like a tourist. He seems to think that by using real locations and casting Savannah socialites as extras that he’s captured the soul of the book. What he’s missed is that Berendt’s ““nonfiction’’ reads like fantasy and requires a more baroque visual style–that touch of mescaline–to transport us into this alternate reality. Anyone who hasn’t read Berendt’s book first may be hard pressed to understand its long-lived allure.
title: “Southern Discomfort” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-04” author: “David Jackson”
Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s uber-confident prime minister, took office three years ago promising to resolve decades of anger and perceived injustice among the south’s 1.8 million Muslims within his first three months in office. But since the violence erupted on Jan. 4, when dozens of gunmen simultaneously attacked a military camp and torched three police posts and 17 local schools in Narathiwat province, it’s clear the situation in the south has gone from bad to worse. Not only have the attacks on police and military units continued, but there now appear to be retribution killings of Muslims as well. And Thaksin’s heavy-handed pursuit of the perpetrators has many southerners feeling like targets.
Within hours of the Jan. 4 attacks, parts of Narathiwat and the majority-Muslim provinces of Yala and Pattani were under martial law. Thousands of Army soldiers and special forces have poured into the region. Authorities have arrested Muslim clerics on suspicion of murder, while soldiers have raided Islamic schools looking for weapons and suspects.
Thai intelligence sources say that a separatist group–or groups–numbering no more than a few hundred people is probably responsible for the death and destruction, which has claimed at least 15 lives. Clearly the Muslim community could be a vital ally in Bangkok’s hunt for the militants. But so far all Thaksin’s dragnet seems to be doing is alienating them. “Could going into [Islamic] schools with [trained] dogs, not taking off your shoes and arresting teachers be counterproductive?” one Western diplomat asks rhetorically. “Yes.”
It’s no surprise that Thailand’s southern Muslims view the government’s troops with some resentment. The Muslim community believes that it has been neglected for decades by a succession of Thai governments, which at most have taken a half-hearted interest in the southern provinces’ economic development. The monthly household income in Narathiwat is half the national average and infant mortality rates in the three southern provinces are as much as 40 percent higher than the rest of the country’s. “Without real human-resource development, these people will not have real opportunities,” says Surin Pitsuwan, a former foreign minister and prominent Muslim figure. “They have to feel they belong.”
If anything, the military’s brute force may be fueling sympathy for the militants. Instead of denouncing the attacks on soldiers, Muslim leaders are decrying Bangkok’s jackboot tactics. They also claim that the Thai government bears responsibility for the spate of retribution murders and kidnappings of Muslims–crimes that authorities allegedly aren’t pursuing with equal vigor. “The local people are living in fear,” says Nimur Makache, deputy head of the Islamic Yala Council. Their anger runs so deep that last week the Yala council, as well as its sister Islamic committees in Pattani and Narathiwat, temporarily broke off communication with the central government. “[The government] needs to be very careful,” warns Pitsuwan.
But Thaksin, who took direct control over the southern operations from his deputy last week, must also move quickly. Thai intelligence sources say that both homegrown and foreign terrorist groups have seriously stepped up their recruitment of young Thais. Their pitch: it’s far more honorable to work toward the creation of a Muslim state than to be loyal to a government that never cared for you in the first place. In response, the Thai Army is considering running a mandatory “patriotic youth” program for young Muslim men to promote nationalism. “We respect Islam,” says Lt. Gen. Jhumpol Munmhy, director of the National Intelligence Agency, “but we must say to them that… you can’t think about separatism.” It won’t matter what the message is, though, if the audience doesn’t trust the messenger.
