Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, who don't have much in the way of family resemblance, are three Southern weird sisters (to risk a redundancy), rather like the heroines of three disparate Tennessee Williams plays assembled for a sitcom pilot. Keaton is an aging virgin afflicted with a "shrunken ovary" and dressed in fashionable and costly English-country attire meant to look old-fashioned and dowdy. Lange, living loose in Hollywood as a would-be singer, smokes like a chimney, wears a blue-jean jacket, and is recuperating from a mental breakdown. Spacek has been having an affair with a black teenager ("I didn't even know you were a liberal," comments one of her sisters) and has just shot her husband. With the role of Patsy Cline already under her belt, Lange easily out-Southerns Keaton, but Spacek shows both of them how an accent, and much else, ought to be done. Australian director Bruce Beresford, who despite the preparatory experience of Tender Mercies is still not at home in America, keeps thinking up things for the camera to do, and Georges Delerue pitches in with background music suggestive of the French intimist cinema. But none of this diminishes the high theatricality of the thing. In its original stage version it won Beth Henley a Pulitzer Prize, which might be more impressive if it were some other prize and if Eugene O'Neill had been still alive at the time. Tess Harper, Sam Shepard. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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