Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (film)
From AwardAnnals
| Film: | Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood |
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| Director: | Callie Khouri |
| Genres: | |
| Distributor: | Warner Home Video |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Grab your tissues and send the guys away, because Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is the most pedigreed chick flick since Steel Magnolias. You can tell by the title and the novelish names of the Louisiana ladies from Rebecca Wells’s precious bestseller. First there’s Sidda (Sandra Bullock), a successful playwright still wrestling with her manipulative mother, Vivi (Ellen Burstyn), after a traumatic upbringing. Then there’s longtime friends Teensy (Fionnula Flanagan), Necie (Shirley Knight), and Caro (scene-stealer Maggie Smith), from Vivi’s secret club of “Ya-Ya Priestesses,” together since childhood and determined to heal the rift between Sidda and her mom. Through an ambitious flashback structure (including Ashley Judd as the younger Vivi), screenwriter and first-time director Callie Khouri (who wrote Thelma & Louise) establishes a rich context for this mother-daughter reunion. There’s plenty of humor to temper the drama, which inspires Bullock’s best work in years. Definitely worth a look for the curious, but only fans of Wells’s fiction will feel any twinge of loyalty. —Jeff Shannon
Barnes and Noble
Callie Khouri, who penned the Oscar-winning script for Thelma and Louise, returns to “chick flick” territory for her directing debut, an adaptation of Rebecca Wells’s megaselling novels Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Altars Everywhere. Sandra Bullock stars as Sidda, a successful, 40-ish playwright who is estranged from her mother, Vivi, a gorgeous, charismatic, alcoholic, and thoroughly unstable southern belle (played, at different stages of her life, by Ellen Burstyn and Ashley Judd). Vivi belongs to a quartet of feisty, hard-drinking matrons (Maggie Smith, Fionnula Flanagan , and Shirley Knight fill out the group) who call themselves the Ya-Yas—a quasi-mystical sisterhood they formed as girls growing up in a small bayou town. Deciding it’s high time that Vivi and her daughter mended their fences, the Ya-Yas whisk Sidda back to Louisiana, where they reveal the secrets behind Vivi’s emotional state and explain how the Ya-Yas sustained each other through life’s travails. Khouri, who also wrote the script, borrows some elements from the decidedly darker Little Altars, but the film’s story and spirit hew much closer to the wish-fulfilling Divine Secrets. There is no shortage of rueful sentimentality as the narrative veers, sometimes clumsily, between flashbacks and present-day events. Missing are the sharp details of southern provincial life that make the books (particularly Little Altars) so vivid, but the performances keep the film crackling. Judd is incandescent as the young Vivi, as is Burstyn in the character’s older incarnation, while veteran actresses Smith, Flanagan, and Knight provide delightful support. Bittersweet and funny, The Divine Secrets is a warmhearted tribute to the unbreakable bonds between mothers, daughters, and lifelong friends. Kryssa Schemmerling
Related works
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: Music From The Motion Picture
With the soundtrack to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, O Brother, Where Art Thou? producer T Bone Burnett has compiled another gently nostalgic gem. Filled with covers of jazz standards, sparse blues picking, and traditional Cajun pieces, Sisterhood matches Brother in ambiance and impeccable musicianship. The highlights are numerous: Bob Dylan’s lively song waltzes with a raspy narrative, Lauryn Hill uses acoustic plucking to complement her soulful croon, and Bob Schneider contributes an understated love-ballad rumbling with…
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel
When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a “tap-dancing child abuser,” the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi’s intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.
In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest for unladylike behavior. Sixty years later, they’re “bucking seventy” and still making waves. They persuade Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of girlhood mementos titled “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.”
With the scrapbook in hand, Sidda retreats to a cabin on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, tormented by fear and uncertainty about the future, and intent on discovering the key to the tangle of anger and tenderness she feels toward her mother. But Vivi’s album reveals more…
