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Fried Green Tomatoes Review: Fried Green Tomatoes is a warm adaptation of Fannie Flagg's popular women's novel that does equal justice to its two featured time periods, while offering useful messages about friendship and standing up for oneself. However, it does teeter on the edge of man-hating and the related exaggerations now and again. How else to explain that sympathetic Ruth Jamison (Mary Louise-Parker) gets romantically entwined with a man so loathsome that not only does he beat her, but he's also a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Fried Green Tomatoes is certainly short on subtlety, polarizing its characters into selfless saints and cruel sinners, but this approach does deliver an unambiguous rallying cry for viewers to apply its self-help agenda to their own lives. Kathy Bates' Evelyn Couch is the viewer's surrogate, as well as the most common demographic of Flagg's readership; overweight and bossed around by her husband, she takes the yarn spun by Jessica Tandy's Ninny Threadgoode and uses is it to channel her dormant feminism. The script, as adapted by Flagg, director Jon Avnet, and Carol Sobieski, is sometimes quite leaden, oozing with simplistic Southern metaphors and the kind of melodrama that features not one, but two accidents involving locomotives. But it can also be subtle, especially in handling the unspoken lesbianism of Mary Stuart Masterson's Idgie Threadgoode. Fried Green Tomatoes is the kind of epic of pop feminism and the old South that should be a favorite for those who gravitate toward these topics. Others may find it heavy-handed, but still worthwhile. Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide

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