Also From The Author • Black History • Helen Keller • Women and the Last 1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Trial • Women's Soccer • RevRus' Star Trek Theology Discussion List • RevRus' Ruminations

This newly released movie is based on two books by Rebecca Well's titled, "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," and "Little Altars Everywhere."

The books have given birth to similar sisterhood groups in more than 16 states and 3 countries. More than 4,000 women are involved in the real world and online. So, it was with great anticipation that I went to see the movie with my own group of Ya-Ya Sisters, ages 16-60.

A few things struck us as we sat waiting for the movie to begin.

The theatre was packed but there were only 3 men in attendance. In addition, the trailers played before the film were wildly inappropriate to the female audience. We were told all about fast cars, bikinis and how the Marines are looking for a few good men.

The ads were so badly out of kilter for the women watching that when the Ya-Ya film logo finally came up saying it was an "All Girl Production," all us girls broke into spontaneous cheers.

The film opens with a small group of girls in the Louisiana of 1937 taking a lifelong vow of sisterhood in the dark with a campfire, homemade crowns and shared chocolate.

Then it cuts "many, many, many moons later" to where the daughter of one of them (Sandra Bulloock as "Sidda") has been interviewed by TIME magazine about her confessional play detailing darker moments with her mother (Ellen Burstyn as "ViVi"). ViVi does not fair well in the translation, to put it mildly.

To save that relationship, the other YaYa sisters drug, kidnap and transport Sidda back to her Louisiana roots to convince her there is more to her mother's story worth hearing. The mission of mercy is to repair the post-interview relationship.

An increasingly important subplot involves convincing Sidda not to run away from a man who has loved her for years.

There are some wonderful truisms in the film of various degrees of importance. They go all the way from that the way to make food arrive in a restaurant is to go to the bathroom to that oftimes if feeling hot you have to "make your own breeze."

There are also some true cultual touchstones like how young we all look in our old pictures to how we hide what we hide.

But, it is about at "how we hide what we hide" where the film began to go wrong for my YaYa systers and me. In the June 6, 2002, USA Today, the director Callie Khouri, said that , "...I tried to deliver the spirit and the heart of the book without necessarily delivering exactly the book."

We Southern sisters understood that two books can not fully fit into less than two hours of movie. But, there were some glaring problems such reasoning could not cover.

First, the number, involvment and importance of the children of the sisters kept changing. In that day and time, with children as the end all and be all of Southern women, a consistent number and presence could have been maintained without sacrificing Sidda as the central offspring.

Second, the film ended with the birthday celebration of the older YaYa sister, ViVi. The books ended with the wedding of Sidda. The books moved forward with promise in this way. The movie stayed somewhat stuck because of this editing choice.

Third, THOSE ACCENTS!!!! They were all from the same small area of the same Southern state! Couldn't a coach have helped them sound more like they grew up near each other? Sidda spent enough time in New York to have less of a Bayou accent. But, there was no excuse for the on-again-off-again, not even sounding related accents of the other actresses.

Fourth, Sidda would have heard almost all those stories and seen some form of those pictures before. This would have especially included her mother's first deceased love. The South is a place of oral history. The location was a small one where everyone had known everyone else since before God was born. Nothing stays a secret in that kind of setting.

It just didn't wash that so much was new to Sidda. That was a Yankee plot device squashed down around a Southern family story and it just didn't work. Think Eudora Welty here. She maintained that all Southern novels needed was a front porch, a sunset, iced tea and one new person who hadn't heard all the family stories before. Sidda, the daughter, wouldn't have been that new person.

Now to explanations and consequences: We heard Vivi's problems were due to the church without any detail beyond her mother and a priest with "cat-eyes." We heard that a doctor made her take pills. We heard that she was so wounded by her times.

We could buy some of that up to a point. We were all Southern raised. Been there for some of it. Done some of that. Have had to take responsibility for most of it.

But all the consequences came down to a conversation on the porch and a question indicating poor body image? Pleeeease!

But wait, it got worse! All ViVi's dreams coming true in Sidda? How healthy is it that Sidda is still expected to be living her mother's life?

Southern women all over the theatre groaned at that one! When is the bill going to come due on that? Everything active has an effect. Is the next movie now set up to be about Sidda and her own daughter's dysfunction?

Don't get us Southern YaYas wrong. There was much to love about the movie...being proud to go to jail together when young...worrying about the afterlife as a poor way to go through this life...looking good as a hostage...not just sitting and puddling.

But divinity arises from a logical, good overflow. Divinity is about ever more and good possibilities.

Unfortunately, the biggest and most open "Secret" of the "YaYa Sisterhood" movie to my friends as we left was the lack of Southern divinity therein.

A user-contributed article by Rev. Rus Cooper-Dowda