A Diverse South in ‘Ya-Yas,’ Nuance Beyond Caricature

As Callie Khouri and I were finishing lunch the other day, an older woman stopped by our table. She’d overheard us trying to make sense of the South and its mysterious hold on generations of writers and filmmakers. Her eyes narrowed, and the woman said, “You can’t possibly explain the South. The South just is.”

Khouri, a born-and-bred Southerner, nodded in agreement. “Well, she sure is right about that.”

Directed by Khouri and based on two popular Rebecca Wells novels, “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” chronicles the attempts of three family friends to negotiate a truce between a wayward daughter and her histrionic mother, played by Sandra Bullock and Ellen Burstyn, respectively. With its plum roles going to actresses, it’s the kind of movie known as a chick flick. But it’s actually something more. It’s a movie about the South, packed with all things Southern, from its Jimmy Reed and Taj Mahal songs to its characters’ hissy fits and high emotions.

“Ya-Ya,” which opens Friday, is also one of the rare examples of Hollywood traveling South and not subjecting the region to abject derision, either by letting actors run amok with syrupy Southern drawls or, as one of the Ya-Yas puts it in the film, “making us all out to be a bunch of swamp-water, alligator-wrestling bigots.” From “Hurry Sundown” to “Mandingo,” “Stroker Ace” to “Where the Heart Is” and hundreds of movies in between, Hollywood has painted the South in broad-brush colors, portraying most everybody as rubes and simplifying its complicated history with paternal sermonizing.

As a third-generation Southerner, I take the caricatures personally. The South is a dense, often schizophrenic place: just as full of idealism as injustice, just as easy to hate as to love. Its prickly beauty has cast a spell on innumerable writers and musicians, but it is all too rarely visible in humbug Hollywood films. As Khouri, a woman known for her blunt manner, puts it: “The South has been horribly maligned in movies. A lot of movies about the South are like minstrel shows--all you see are those crazy Southerners with marbles in their mouth.”

She sighs. “Put it this way, I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than see ‘Steel Magnolias.’”

Khouri, whose script for “Ya-Ya Sisterhood” is based on an adaptation by Mark Andrus, was born in San Antonio and raised in Paducah, Ky. Like so many Southerners, she is someone who likes to talk. By the time we finished lunch, the valet was bringing our car keys to the table--everyone else had gone home.

“I’m always ready to chew the fat,” Khouri says. “I just find people fascinating. Maybe it’s my face, but people always tell me their life stories. At the junket for our movie, the interviews would be over and I kept saying, ‘Where are y’all going?’”

Khouri has a Southerner’s fondness for grand language and hyperbole. She calls her friend, director Jessie Nelson, “my oracle of Delphi.” Asked why she cast Burstyn as Vivi, the film’s tempestuous grande dame, Khouri explains: “She’s just glorious to look at. There’s a light shining out of her, like the sun.” She can also be witheringly blunt, especially when speculating on reasons for why the South has been so stereotyped.

“Every time I hear an argument about flying the Rebel flag over a statehouse, I say, ‘Dude, you lost the war 150 years ago. Let it go.’ Those are the things that allow people to think, ‘Oh, Southerners just must be stupid.’”

There is plenty of talk in “Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” in which tirades and recriminations erupt like summer thunderstorms. Khouri encouraged her actors to turn it up a notch, as if they were in a quick-talking Howard Hawks movie. “That’s one of the problems with movies about the South--people speak too slowly,” she says. “The wit in the South where I grew up was dry and sharp. No one spoke slowly, unless for effect.”

So why does Hollywood rarely get beyond the cliches about the South? “Hollywood has a very Hollywood idea of what the South is--they don’t get out of town very much,” says director John Sayles, whose new film, “Sunshine State,” uses a north Florida beach town as the setting for a knowing look at the deep-rooted tensions between the New and Old South. “When they come to the South, they only see the most exotic elements, not the everyday things.”

Sayles has visited Florida for years to see family and has even written a novel--in Spanish--that’s set in Miami. But before he started shooting “Sunshine State,” he gave his script out to locals to check for authenticity.

All too often, Hollywood’s idea of Southern drama involves 1960s-era civil rights stories, but for many Southerners, black and white, it’s stereotyping at its worst, because racism can be found just about anywhere. As Charles Burnett, director of “To Sleep With Anger,” noted in an issue of the Oxford American, a magazine devoted to Southern culture, “Hollywood’s mirror should be turned inward. There are more racial problems in the Hollywood film industry than anyplace in America.”

The South has other rarely explored conflicts, be it class division or the differences between rural and urban values. “Have you ever seen a comedy of manners like ‘The Lady Eve’ set in the privileged South?” says Gary Hawkins, director of “The Rough South of Larry Brown,” a new documentary about the Mississippi writer. “You don’t see movies about the New South, with bankers or dot-com executives. People in Hollywood have no idea how diverse the South is today.”

Some of the best acting in Southern films has been done by nonnatives; Robert Duvall, who is from San Diego, has played a gallery of great Southern characters, in films ranging from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “The Apostle.” But it’s often difficult for outsiders to understand Southerners’ outsized personalities.

“You find a lot of bigger-than-life characters in the South, but as a filmmaker, your job is to get past the cliche,” says “The Rookie” director John Lee Hancock, who spent months in Savannah, Ga., writing the film adaptation of John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” “People come to the South and think, ‘I’m gonna do a circus movie with these big, bawdy cartoonish people.’ But if you look at a great film like ‘Tender Mercies’ [which starred Duvall], you see a respect for the characters and the sense of place.”

The good films about the South capture a sense of place, whether it’s the foreboding Arkansas gloom of “Sling Blade,” the spectral Louisiana swamps of “Eve’s Bayou” or the flat Texas prairie in “Hud.” “Ya-Ya Sisterhood” used North Carolina to double for the books’ Louisiana setting, but Khouri says, “Don’t worry, we still had plenty of humidity.”

“Ya Ya” delicately handles the issue of race, which lurks under the surface in any Southern story, no matter how escapist. In one of the movie’s 1930s-era flashback scenes, the Ya-Yas stay at their Aunt Louise’s antebellum mansion in Atlanta, accompanied by Willetta, Vivi’s family’s black housekeeper. Basking in the glow of so much luxury, the young Vivi proclaims, “Isn’t this just the most magnificent thing that could ever happen?” Willetta dryly responds: “I suppose that’s what I’d be thinking if I was you.” When Aunt Louise’s bratty son insults Willetta at breakfast, Vivi hits him in the face with a plate full of eggs and grits, saying, “You shut your mouth, you prissy little mama’s boy!”

Khouri is honest enough to acknowledge that the altercation, which also appears in Wells’ novel, is something of an idealized version of white-black relations in the South. “When I was growing up, I had a lot to learn,” she says. “I didn’t know any black doctors, all I knew was black housekeepers, waiters and caddies. What I did learn was that you could notice that you were racist and correct it. What really scared me was that everyone could be so damn nice and polite and harbor such deep hatreds toward other people.”

It’s those sort of contradictions that make the South such fertile ground for storytellers, especially the ones willing to see past Hollywood cliches and get at the truth.

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“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.