I read the novella before watching the movie so I could nitpick, but I won’t.
This is yet another Capote tale based upon the aunts/cousins he lived with in the south, however, this time the story is more fictionalized. And the cast is stacked!
Edward Furlong (in a time after Terminator 2, but hopefully before the substance abuse) plays Colin, the nephew and narrator who lives with his older cousins. Aunt Dolly (Piper Laurie) is another version of Capote’s sweet and somewhat eccentric cousin Sook. Dolly makes a herbal remedy popular in their small town. Her sister Verena (Sissy Spacek) has controlled Dolly and Colin’s lives for years. When she brings home a snake oil salesman (holy crap - it’s Jack Lemmon) who wants to buy Dolly’s medical recipe, it drives Dolly, Colin and the servant/friend Catherine (Nell Carter) literally up a tree. They are soon joined by other people done with society - a judge (Walter Mathau), the coolest teen in town (Sean Patrick Flanery- one of my first crushes), and a family of traveling evangelists led by Mary Steenburgen. The people of the town start to take sides on whether they think the tree dwellers have lost their minds or if they deserve a break from the world. By the way, the townspeople include Joe Don Baker, Charles During, Scott Wilson, and FREAKING Roddy McDowell. Did they just send out a casting call for all character actors who weren’t busy that month?
The movie tries to add more backstory, showing Colin’s life before he lives with his Aunt Dolly and Aunt Verena. There is a little more of his talk about daydreaming, stories he’d make up, and Colin’s enjoyment of thinking up adventures he and his Aunt Dolly would never have. No major spoilers here, but I will say that later, Colin leaves for the city in order to get experience as a writer. The Judge gifts him a fancy notebook to get him started and Colin takes the Judge to listen to the “grass harp”, voices “inside his head” and the loudest voice is Dolly’s.
