I discovered this film a few years ago and since then it has become a firm favourite; its a very easy film to watch and in quiet times I find myself going back to watch this.The plot focuses on May-Alice Culhane a successful soap-opera who is struck in New York leaving her without the ability to walk. This event prompts her to leave her high flying life in New York, to return to the area she grew up in. Here, she faces an identity crisis having lost her freedom and her career. The film explores May-Alice's experience of such a loss the emotional trauma is brilliantly portrayed by Mary McDonnell and her nomination for this film is well deserved. Overall the film is about coping with trauma and who a person becomes after such an experience. The ending is quite open and that perhaps symbolizes the uncertainty of May-Alice and Chantelle's future.

Passion Fish (1992)I wish I could like John Sayles films more. They want to be so important and serious, about exceptional people in normal working America. Characters are dying to be felt for and understood, and the turns of events are poignant in simple ways we can relate to.So it is with Passion Fish, with a couple changes. For the first long part of the movie the main character, an ex-soap opera star recently made paraplegic, is completely unlikable. But eventually we come to appreciate her attitude, and other characters arrive, namely a nurse who can stick it out with her.So if all this sounds good, it is. But the writing is a little off, a little wrong, all the way through. Occasionally it's just a strain (I laughed out loud a couple times at it, not with it). There's not problem with the subjects and what they do, but what they say, a hair off key from what such real people would say. Or that's the sense you get. And the filming is adequate without being magical, or emphatic, or whatever it is that great movies pull off. The camera-work, the editing, the clunky addition of sounds, it's all a little crude, as if it didn't matter that it was just functional and used a few cheap devices (like a little montage sequence with snippets dissolving one into another like a sentimental ad). In fact, it has a television quality even though Sayles has never done t.v. as far as I know.If you are really into content, though, and real people with real problems, none of this will matter as much. And the compensations include gritty acting, which makes the most of the dialog. If this lack of style is your style, you'll like it. If you want formal intentions of any kind you might think it's slow and unartful.

A crippled TV soap opera star (Mary McDonnell) retreats, with undisguised bitterness, to her neglected childhood home in Louisiana, where she proceeds to make life hell for a series of nurses, until the arrival of Alfre Woodard. The balance of the movie follows McDonnell's slow emotional recovery and her reluctant friendship with Woodard, but despite the similarity to so many other Hollywood rehab dramas there isn't a wasted word or image, and not a cliché in sight. The film marks a return to the intimate scale of director John Sayles' earlier efforts, and it's a pleasure to finally see a mainstream American movie with the novelty of real characters speaking believable dialogue, written by a filmmaker with enough patience to allow his story to develop at a natural pace. The result is a leisurely but powerful drama, with more than its share of humor and with plenty of lively local Cajun culture. Trivia note: both McDonnell and Woodard were previously featured in Lawrence Kasdan's Yuppie wish-fulfillment fantasy 'The Grand Canyon' where, ironically, they never shared a single scene.

I finally bought this film because I kept renting it. The slow pace is just right, never boring, and puts one endearing and individual character after another before us. Sugar is one of my favorites. David Straitharn is a brilliant actor and his characterization of Rennie has not one false note. I have lived in South Louisiana for 30 years and this movie made the area another character; the sense of place is flawless. The two leading ladies never upstage either each other or any of the other actors; this movie is a true ensemble piece. All of this keeps me coming back to this very redemptive film, a real work of art. Particularly well done is the contrast between the artificial world of New York theater, and the real world of ordinary people facing very difficult problems. The viewer is deliberately made comfortable in that real world, with no sense of being patronized. This reviewer gave up a professional theater career for "the real world", and I am very glad to see a film that doesn't just tell the truth but shows it in every nuance, in every note of music, and in the wonderful pauses between scenes. May-Alice gives me a jolt of hope and humor every time I see this film. Bravo.