Complex characters, passion mark ‘Sad Café’
By Julie Brown-Micko

The small-town café is a creature of myth as well as reality. It’s a cultural memory so deep that everyone can recall (or at least imagine) a long-gone dusty dive that served honest food and a sense of belonging in equal portions. This archetypal joint is the perfect setting for the grand Gothic drama of The Ballad of the Sad Café, a film based on a classic Carson McCullers story.

Miss Amelia (Vanessa Redgrave), a strong, strange woman, has created a modestly successful, if lonely, life for herself in a poverty-stricken Southern town. Part folk-healer, part bootlegger, she dispenses her moonshine with the same no-nonsense kindness that she shows ailing children and beaten wives. Times are hard, money is scarce and kindness is difficult to come by. Then one evening a mysterious figure arrives claiming kinship with Miss Amelia. He’s “cousin” Lyman (Cork Hubbert), a hunchbacked dwarf in need of a home. Amelia takes him in and he cultivates a sense of joy and possibility that’s missing in her hardscrabble life. Soon the pair opens a café. They sell chicken dinners, liquor by the glass and something money can’t buy: happiness. But when Miss Amelia’s erstwhile husband Marvin Macy (Keith Carradine) gets out of jail and returns to settle unfinished business with her, everyone’s life takes a dark, unpredictable turn.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is an unexpected tale of passion. Great, shattering passions that spark love so strong and brutal it is more like hate. Each character commits his (and her) share of cruel, inhuman acts. Loneliness and the thwarted desire for connection bind Miss Amelia, Cousin Lyman and Marvin Macy in an unorthodox love triangle not often seen in a Hollywood film.

Characters are complex and motives nearly inscrutable. Redgrave’s performance is a tour de force. Her gaunt body, piercing blue eyes and shorn head complement her strong-as-iron will and odd beauty. Hubbert and Carradine are less compelling, but effectively communicate brokenness and need. In a turning point of the film, Rod Steiger as Reverend Willin muses that “every lover knows that deep, deep in his soul love is a lonely and solitary thing,” and that “the state of being beloved is intolerable.”

The café and the townsfolk provide crucible and chorus for the larger-than-life characters. Some folks cheer, some cry, some impassively bear witness to the brutal showdown between lover and beloved in the restaurant. For non-sentimental types, the grand sweep of the ending may feel overdone. Others may find a sort of satisfying pain in it, like the burn of hard liquor.

It’s a conclusion that will leave viewers, like the townsfolk in the film, with something to talk about long after the café is gone.