With funny hats, silly names, a lyrical mock-drowning, a picturesque plane flight and intermittent mooning about the moon, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood pours a bag of sugar over a double dose of medicine.
At bottom it's the tale of a New York playwright-director, Sidda (Sandra Bullock), belatedly coming of age. Her impending marriage and first big-time success compel her to confront her volatile Louisiana upbringing - and her flamboyant, dominating mother, Vivi (Ellen Burstyn).
Prodding them to closure is a trio of good-hearted grotesques: tough Teensy (Fionnula Flanagan), wisecracking Caro (Maggie Smith), and nice-girl Necie (Shirley Knight). They're Vivi's "Ya-Ya Sisterhood," who sanctified their childhood friendship with cut palms, making them blood sisters.
In the psychotherapeutic section, Sidda discovers why Vivi, who could be tender toward her children, could also beat and temporarily abandon them. Vivi learns that she shouldn't have tried to hide problems like mental illness and drug addiction from her kids. While these two take their life lessons, the Ya-Yas provide a tipsy paradigm of friends who love each other with fewer conditions than spouses or relatives.
It's the kind of comic-dramatic seesaw that requires exquisite balance. Too bad poise has never distinguished the work of writer-director Callie Khouri (she wrote the scripts for Thelma and Louise and Something to Talk About) or Mark Andrus (who gets a separate credit for "adaptation" and wrote the scripts for As Good as It Gets and Life as a House).
This movie leaps between catty farce and household melodrama. There's no attempt to replicate the conversational line of Rebecca Wells' original novel - the book that caused Terry McMillan to exclaim, "I haven't heard a white woman talk like this in literature before." From the get-go it's too clunky and stagy.
The way Khouri and Andrus spin Wells' tale, it still starts with Sidda giving a mama-damning interview (to Time, not The New York Times) and Vivi responding with fury. But now, the Ya-Yas go to Manhattan, knock Sidda out with the date-rape drug, and shanghai her back to Louisiana, where they use their scrapbook of divine secrets to open her eyes to the way things really were.
Did the setup have to be so frantic and ridiculous? You keep wondering what's happening to Sidda's new production when she's down in Dixie. It's a sign of the adapters' desperation at constructing a workable scenario from a sprawling friends-and-family chronicle. They never do.
As the movie flashes back to the '30s, '40s and '60s, with Ashley Judd playing Vivi as a young woman, every scene is both too general and too intense, like a string of domestic-crime photos interspersed with nostalgic postcards and cartoons. Neither Sidda nor Vivi commands sympathy: Bullock doesn't find anything to play except moroseness and forgiveness, while Burstyn doesn't provide any nuance to her remorseful hysteric.
There are no surprises in the storytelling: It follows a by-now familiar cycle of emotional violence. The moviemakers (like Wells) bend over backward to give Vivi reasons for her bad behavior: Her mother, Buggy (the great stage actress Cherry Jones, in an embarrassing performance) was both a rigid Catholic and insanely competitive and jealous.
Vivi never recovered from the death of her Army Air Corps true love in World War II, even after she married the genial Shep (James Garner plays him in the present-day action). A prescription drug called Dexamil takes the blame for Vivi terrorizing her kids.
With all this pathos backing her up, Ashley Judd still can't fashion a tragic arc from golden girl to trapped housewife. The dramaturgy is too forced and fragmentary.
As for the Ya-Yas: They're not as much fun as the First Wives' Club. They're the sort of supporting characters whose impact is based on zingers, but Khouri's bluntness de-zings them. They end up wobbly satellites around the shaky planet Vivi.
You're apt to laugh at their weirdest and most non-verbal moments: Smith turning a kissing sound into a crusty meow, Flanagan staring Burstyn down like a banshee who wouldn't flinch at Medusa, and Knight making good-witch gestures over the Ya-Yas' secret potion.
The most restful scene comes right at the end, when Vivi's long-suffering spouse Shep and Sidda's patient fiance Connor (Angus MacFadyen) share a quiet moment of unstated male understanding. By then, the audience, too, is glad to be with the men on the porch while the women bond like crazy inside.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Starring Sandra Bullock, Ellen Burstyn, Ashley Judd, James Garner, and Maggie Smith
Directed by Callie Khouri
Rated PG-13
Released by Warner Bros.
Running time 117 minutes
SUN SCORE * *