It is gratifying to know Nick Cassavetes admires and appreciates his mother, but his movie does her no favors. Sister Verena is played with one-note repression by Sissy Spacek. The movie plays at the snail's pace of a small southern town, which is just a little too simple when it comes to either the South or Truman Capote. But something's missing. What's lacking here is a sense of the defining gene that makes Southerners think and feel one way, and talk and act another.
Propriety dictates gentility and neighborliness, which in turn represses rage and resentment.
Anger always squeezes itself out in one way or another in any culture, but in the South it usually finds some marvelously eccentric channel from gut to the spoken word. Without that eccentricity, the movie borders on being sweet. None of this diminishes the fine performances of the cast, especially Piper Laurie's Dolly, who flutters and putters in an imaginary world of her own.