Heart of Dixie Reviews

HEART OF DIXIE is one of those good news-bad news films. The good news is that director Martin Davidson has drawn solid performances from his three lead actresses and done a good job of re-creating the genteel, racist South of 1957, when the civil rights movement was still in its early stages. The bad news is that audiences are likely to come away from the film wondering what the point of it was. Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen, and Phoebe Cates respectively play Maggie, a budding journalist; Delia, a quintessential southern belle; and Aiken, a beatnik in black leotards--sorority sisters at an Alabama college. Maggie senses the winds of change and becomes tentatively active in the drive toward desegregation, but her efforts are complicated by the problems of accommodating both her progressive social beliefs and southern womanhood's traditional submission to male authority. More than a look at changing racial politics, HEART OF DIXIE intends no less than to make a sweeping indictment of the whole patriarchal power structure of 1950s Southern culture. Unfortunately, the film lacks dramatic focus; Tom McCown's script, adapted from Anne Rivers Siddons' novel Heartbreak Hotel, rushes form one burning issue to the next, as if it were more interested in being comprehensive than in being coherent.