A Story of Love and Friendship: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
One of the rarest and most adored things in life is the wonderful story of the old days told by your grandparents or that special older person in your life. The stories they tell are of mementos in their life. Whether it be something that involved them or someone of their past; the stories normally lead to a life lesson. Life lessons that you see in family sitcoms or movies. Some exciting. Some heart breaking, but every time you catch yourself in awe listening to them tell this wonderful tale. This is no exception in the film Fried Green Tomatoes. This film is considered a cult classic and I can see why. Fried Green Tomatoes portrays the wonderful story of love and friendship, giving a warm sense of hope, an abundance of laughter, cravings for fried green tomatoes, and then leaving you with tears.
This film starts out in the 1990s showing Evelyn Couch (Kathy Bates) and her husband Ed Couch (Gailard Sartain) stopped in the middle of no where Alabama. They got lost on the way to visit Ed’s aunt in the nursing home. As Ed asks Evelyn where Whistle Stop was on the map, unknowingly they were already in Whistle Stop. The town looks to be run down and abandoned. The café has graffiti all over and its windows are broken. Life had stopped. Evelyn hears the ghostly sound of the train coming through and this is where the story starts. Evelyn meets Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy) in the living area of the nursing home. Ninny strikes up a conversation with Evelyn and brings up the name Idgie Threadgoode (Mary Stuart Masterson). She says, “You’d remember her.” Ninny starts to tell Evelyn about Idgie’s brother Buddy Threadgoode (Chris O’Donnell), who Idgie looked up to. He was her best friend and she would only listen to him. Ninny portrays the time around 1920, the first great war had ended and the second one was about to begin. The day of Buddy and Idgie’s older sister’s wedding was the day that changed Idgie’s life. After the wedding, Idgie and Buddy were walking around the yard and they run into to Ruth Jamison (Mary Louise Parker) whom Buddy was in love with. As they leave the festivities, the wind picks up and Ruth’s hat flies off her head onto the train tracks. Buddy goes to retrieve it and as he walks along the tracks; his foot gets caught within the tracks. A train comes and sadly Buddy got ran over by the train. So early on in the movie and I was already crying. Knowing your loved one is dead is hard but seeing them die had to be just horrible. Ninny goes on to claim that “it [Buddy’s death] liked to killed us all… but everyone thought she [Idgie] had died with him”. This is where the first of many conversations between Ninny and Evelyn end. Like most people this is where I am hooked on this story of Idgie Threadgoode. Ninny had let it slip about possibly Idgie killing a man named Frank Bennett.
Now Evelyn goes on home and it shows how Evelyn is in a “marriage saving” type lecture class. Ed and Evelyn do not have much of a marriage left and she is trying to hold on to it as much as any good woman would. Imagining how her husband would react if he were to come home to her only wrapped in cellophane brings her down in the dumps. Evelyn is the type of wife that you would consider as “living in the dark ages”, she only cooks, cleans, and makes sure everything is ready for her husband when he comes homes from work. Ed, on the other hand, is ungrateful and only wants to drink beer with dinner and watch sports. This is not something that is a bad thing, but Evelyn notices her husbands’ attitude towards her. He does not compliment her unless it is about her cooking. She is ready to spice up their marriage back to the way it was before their son had grown up and moved away. If Evelyn only knew what was to come of her relationship with Ninny and the confidence that becomes her.
As the weeks pass, Evelyn gets to visit Ninny more and more. Ninny continues on with her story of Idgie and Ruth. Idgie’s story starts to inspire Evelyn to do her own thing and get a job, exercise, and stand up for herself. I like to call it the Tawanda mindset. The story of Idgie and Ruth is what brings the confidence and courage to Evelyn Couch as Ninny tells this whirlwind of story. Idgie is rough between the edges and that is shown in Evelyn as the movie progresses. In one scene, Evelyn tries to get a parking spot at the grocery store. We have all been there, wait for someone to back out only to be beaten by a faster car who comes up the other side and steals the parking space. As this happened to Evelyn, two young girls pop out and tell her “Face it old lady, we are younger and faster”. This infuriates Evelyn and she says “Tawanda” under her breathe and takes her car and starts to ram into the girl’s vehicle six times! As the young girls come out asking her what she thinks she is doing, Evelyn exclaims “Face it girls, I’m older and have more insurance”. I never laughed so hard. This is a perfect example of how Evelyn grows. Soon enough, Evelyn becomes attached to Ninny as if she was her mother. She tells Ninny her sorrows, her excitements and how she would like to hit Ed with a baseball bat. Ninny confides in Evelyn about her son Albert who was mentally handicapped and died at the age of 30. They become best friends and are the reasons for each other to keep going. Ninny and Evelyn’s relationship gives you the sense of hope you need in humanity as two different people become the best of friends over a story of one’s past.
The story that Ninny tells about Idgie and Ruth, that is a love and friendship story. The story takes place in Whistle Stop, Alabama in the year 1937–1938. This is the deep south when whites and blacks did not work together nor befriend one another and the KKK was running wild amongst the south. Times were hard, but through it all, Idgie and Ruth became close and never left one another’s side. A little fact about Idgie and Ruth’s relationship that was unknown in the movie was that they were lesbian lovers. While doing research, I found out that the director worked close with the author of the book to keep it as close to the book as possible but, in order to make the movie more on the family friendly side, the director kept out the love relationship between Idgie and Ruth. In my opinion, I believe this would have made the movie stronger and more emotional if the director had included this information. Throughout the movie you see underlying context that hints around to the lesbian relationship. One important scene when Ruth is trying to get Idgie to start coming back to church, Idgie and Ruth decide to get to know each other better so Idgie takes Ruth to this field where there is a tree, half dead, to show her where she collects her honey. During this scene you see Ruth’s expression as Idgie takes her arm inside this tree to retrieve the honey. Ruth tells her she had heard of people charming bees but had never seen it before that day. She exclaims “You just a bee charmer Idgie Threadgoode, that’s what you are, a bee charmer”. Ruth was impressed by the way Idgie risked her life to collect the honey.
Other examples of one falling for the other is when Idgie finds out about Ruth getting married to Frank Bennett on the night of Ruth’s birthday. They had both gotten drunk, played baseball, and ended up swimming in the lake. When Ruth tells Idgie that it is the best birthday she has ever had, she plants a kiss on the cheek of Idgie. This is where you see Idgie knowingly find out she is in love with Ruth and her heart broke in the same moment. Idgie is portrayed in the movie as more masculine than feminine by just what she wears. About a year later after Ruth got married, Idgie come to visit her and noticed a big shiner on Ruth’s eye. Ruth’s husband Frank was beating her. After Ruth’s mother died, Idgie goes to get Ruth out of the household as she finds out she is pregnant. When Frank caught Ruth trying to leave, he hits her and Idgie jumps on top of him.
She threatens to kill him if he touches Ruth ever again. Then the last you notice is when Ruth and Idgie have the Whistle Stop Café open, they are in the kitchen working together. Idgie is making fried green tomatoes and ask Ruth to try them. Ruth tells her that they are terrible. As they laugh it off, they begin to have a food fight. The intimacy between the two of them during this scene is so adorable but it also shows how much in love they are with one another.
With all good love stories there is always a little bit of heartache. Ninny ends the story of Idgie and Ruth with when Ruth becomes sick with cancer, Idgie closed down the café and they kept her at home so she would be comfortable. As Ruth is starting to pass, she asks Idgie to tell her one of her stories. Especially the one about the lake. That was Ruth’s favorite story, as it was the first story Buddy Threadgoode told Ruth the day he died. This is by the far the saddest scene in the movie. Whistle Stop shut down after Ruth died, that’s why it was so run down in the beginning of the movie. But it all ends on a good note with Ninny getting to move out of the nursing home and into Evelyn’s home. Ninny tells Evelyn “You reminded me about what the most important thing in life is. Friends, best friends”. If you want a good story of the past, you want to laugh, cry, and feel good down to your soul, take the time to watch Fried Green Tomatoes. It is a story about friends, best friends.
