Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

After his disastrous Popeye, Robert Altman rebuilt his credibility by making a series of small-budget movies based on plays, starting with Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Cher credits him with launching her acting career, starring alongside an ensemble of women who play members of a James Dean fan club reuniting in 1975, on the twentieth anniversary of hearing on the radio that he had died. It takes place in a small shop in a podunk West Texas town–the kind you drive through and wonder if anyone even lives there. The type of town that drains you unless you get the hell out.

Cher plays Sissy, a beautiful woman known for having “the biggest pair of melons in the whole goddamn state of Texas.” She’s wonderful in this, nailing the Texas accent without going overboard; she’s charming, natural, and convincing. I was won over when she comes in from the rain, looks in the mirror, gasps “Oh my God” in a deep, dramatic voice, and fixes her hair. Back in 1955, she had two best friends and coworkers, Mona and Joe, who she lip syncs and dances with as the McGuire sisters.

Mona, played by Sandy Dennis, was an extra on the set of Giant in Marfa, Texas, where she had one magical night with James Dean and got pregnant with their son, Jimmy Dean. She’s obsessed with James Dean and, after having his baby, craves attention, putting up signs on the freeway that say “See the son of James Dean, visit Woolworth’s Five and Dime” and displaying him to attract shoppers. It turns out that Jimmy Dean is mentally handicapped and Mona has to shield him from ridicule by people in town.

Joe is relentlessly teased for having only female friends. At a school dance, he dresses as a woman and hooks up with a classmate named Lester T. But when Lester T. discovers Joe’s fake breasts, he beats Joe horribly. His friends patch him up, but he’s suddenly fired from his job “because of what he is.” The shop owner, Juanita, defends the firing, saying, “He is a sick boy and should be treated before he grows up into a Communist.” Joe leaves town.

Juanita is an abrasive, judgmental Christian who displays a portrait of Jesus in her shop outlined in tacky, neon pink lights. All she does is swat flies, offer orange crush, pour leftover drinks back into the pitcher, and scold Sissy for cursing.

In 1975, Sissy, Mona, and Juanita prepare for the reunion, hanging a dinky banner and making Wonder Bread, mayonnaise, and cheese sandwiches. A fan club member played by Kathy Bates arrives from Dallas in a flashy pink outfit and cowboy hat with a big pink feather in it. She’s declares there’s nothing and no one left in town and wonders why the rest of them still live there.

Then Karen Black arrives in a yellow sports car, beautiful, elegant, and mysterious. She gradually lets on that she knows all about them, including where Juanita’s supposedly pious and sober husband hid his whiskey bottle. She finally reveals that she’s Joe–she had a sex change operation and changed her name to Joanne, which is darkly ironic since this is what Lester T. had called her while beating her, “doing the job this whole damn town had been wanting to do to me for years.”

Joanne’s arrival drags old tensions out into the open. Despite Lester T.’s attack on her friend Joe, Sissy married him because he really liked her boobs. But after she had to have a double mastectomy and implants he found her repulsive and left her. Joanne describes the night she was working as a dancer in a bar when Lester T. walked in and “His eyes went straight to my boobs.” They went to a hotel, but Joanne couldn’t go through with it. Sissy breaks down, shouts about her “rubber tits,” and sardonically says, “I sure pulled the rubber over their eyes.”

Mona relives her magical night with James Dean. She and Joe drove to Marfa to be chosen as extras on Giant, with her pretending to be Natalie Wood and Joe as James Dean. They slept in Joe’s Buick. One night she saw a shooting star, followed it to where it landed, and found James Dean. They spent the night together, and she got pregnant. As she tells this, both past Joe and present Joanne ask, “Mona, are you going to tell?” and “Gee Mona, that’s not the way it happened at all, is it?” Finally, Mona comes back to reality, and everyone admits that they always knew that James Dean wasn’t actually the father of her son, Joe was. Mona says she’s so embarrassed, that she just wanted to be noticed and that being chosen to be an extra in Giant felt like being chosen for the first time.

Meanwhile, Juanita prays that the thunder they hear means a much needed rainstorm is coming, but it passes them by. She briefly loses her faith in God, picks up her husband’s whiskey, and admits that she knew about his secret drinking. Sissy turns off the neon Jesus lights and says God’s not watching.

They promise to meet again in twenty years. Everyone leaves except Sissy, Mona, and Joanne, who dance as the McGuire sisters while the camera pans away to the shop, which is now abandoned and decayed.

This movie perfectly captures the feeling of growing up in a nowhere Texas town. I grew up in a nice suburb of Houston but spent summers in towns now known for their tragedies–Uvalde’s school shooting, Kerrville’s deadly flooding–both preventable, supremely Texas events. I’ve lost track of all my high school friends because, like me, they either left as soon as they could or got stuck in Texas, maybe moving to Houston, Austin, or College Station, maybe staying put, hanging out at pool halls and buying McMansions with swimming pools. There’s a lot to like about Texas, but the character of its people isn’t one of those things. Even in large, culturally rich, blue cities, you still live under the oppressive atmosphere of TEXAS, whose self-mythologizing is greater than any state I’ve visited.

This movie illustrates the cruelty, small-mindedness, and Christian judgement that’s inescapable in that state. Bound by shared cultural identity, history, and lack of imagination, the characters are cruel and resentful toward each other yet maintain their relationships because there’s nowhere else to go. For many, there is no escaping Texas, so the bitterness piles up. You can bury it, but it will surface, directly or through passive-aggressive sniping. These characters may be realistic and relatable, but they’re awful, and I couldn’t wait to be done with them.

VERDICT: STRAIGHT TO JAIL