"Divine" trashed
by Lovell
Mahan-Moutaw

It is one of my favorite books of all time. I laughed, I cried, I nearly gave up writing because I was worried I would never be able to be as brilliant at telling a story as Rebecca Wells. It might not be for everyone, but for me, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood could not have been more perfect.

And for that reason alone, the movie was doomed to fail.

In past months, I have backpedaled on my grand statement of "nothing should ever be adapted." To quote someone somewhere, "When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong." I was wrong. Peter Jackson proved it - along with several others, including, most recently, Sam Raimi.

Even so, I went to see Callie Khouri's The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood deliberately devoid of high hopes. A) I knew it couldn't be as good as the book, so I needed to view it on its own terms and then be the judge; and B) I'd heard it was shite so I wasn't expecting much even when I already wasn't expecting much.

It gave me even less.

I'm not certain if someone who hasn't read the book can even be aware of the depth of story behind the dysfunction between Vivian and Siddalee Walker, mother and daughter trying to come to terms with a past profoundly beautiful and hideously terrible.

Vivi (played almost clownishly in the movie by Ellen Burstyn) is an old woman whose abuse by her mother (in the name of God), and loss of a lover (who disappeared, never to return, in WWII), and all the subsequent changes that went along with that loss, "drops her basket" when life, all too real, becomes too much to bear. She suffers a breakdown which causes her to beat the living shit out of her kids and disappear (to an asylum). Siddalee, the oldest, (played by Sandra Bullock who needs a new agent; her talent is being wasted) bears the brunt of the beating, and worries her whole life that her mother went away because she had done something wrong.

Lost in the movie, rich in the book, are Neecie, Teensy and Caro - the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the girls who know all of Vivi's sordid secrets and protect their friend through thick and thin. Lost also are Jack and Genevieve. Jack is Vivi's boyfriend, a kind and gentle soul, shelter in the storm of Vivi's life. The man who would have let her soar while secretly keeping her tethered to the ground. Genevieve, Teensy and Jack's mother, is (along with the Ya-Yas and Jack) the only bright spot in Vivi's dark world. In the film, Jack is barely explained and Genevieve's treatment is even more criminal. And I won't even get into how Neecie, Teensy and Caro are mishandled.

Also lost is Vivi's, well, vivaciousness...she eats life. She dreams, plans, schemes, laughs - she is bigger than life, and no matter how badly she is beaten back, she comes back fighting. Until, well...until it all becomes too much for her.

Bullock does the best she can with Siddalee, and even manages to inject some goodly amount of deserved anger at the Ya-Yas for standing by, and even helping, while Vivi misbehaves herself unforgivably. Ashley Judd, who plays the younger Vivi, acquits herself well, even brilliantly on some occasions, but she's swimming upstream with this one. Only one moment in the film realy plays true: Vivi's father making a spectacle of himself after Vivi's birthday party. So horrifying to watch, the bile rises in the back of your throat.

Not only are the characters stripped of all that makes them jump from the pages of the book, the story itself is changed. In the book, Sidda takes herself off to think and to try to come to terms with that one horrible night. Vivi sends "The Divine Secrets," a scrapbook of the last fifty years of her and her friend's lives, and Sidda reads letters and sees photographs and pieces her mother's life together, coming to terms with it slowly and thoughtfully. The Ya-Yas are there to fill in the blanks. In the film, for some ungodly reason, the Ya-Yas kidnap Sidda (by giving her the date rape drug, FOR GOD'S SAKE) to educate her on the atrocities that Vivi endured to become what she is. This is just the beginning - it doesn't end there and it doesn't get any better.

I could go on about Maggie Smith (as Caro) trying to take off a Southern accent (or any of them, for that matter). Or James Garner (Shep, Vivi's husband) struggling with a character who seems totally out of place. Or the completely ridiculous phone exchanges that are meant to be funny. Or the removal of Vivi's hideous treatment at the hands of her mother, which explains so much about her.

But I won't - any non-fan of the book won't even care to read to this point.

All I can say is, I was sorely disappointed. It would have been difficult to make a movie from this book and not lose some of the depth and passion of the characters and events. But this film doesn't even scratch the surface.

©2002 Lovell Mahan-Moutaw
CineScene