Crimes of the Heart begins with a gunshot and a glass of lemonade. That combination — violence and Southern hospitality, tragedy and absurd comedy — is the key to Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and to Bruce Beresford’s 1986 film adaptation. Sissy Spacek plays Rebecca “Babe” Magrath Botrelle, the youngest of three sisters who reunite in their family home in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, after Babe is arrested for shooting her husband. Spacek’s performance won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a comedy or musical and brought her another Academy Award nomination, and it shows a side of her talent that her darker dramas sometimes hid: she is very, very funny.
The Magrath sisters are a remarkable trio. Lenny, played by Diane Keaton, is the eldest, a practical, lonely woman who has stayed at home to care for their grandfather. Meg, played by Jessica Lange, is the middle sister, a would-be actress who has returned from Los Angeles with glamour, disappointment, and a complicated romantic history. Babe, the youngest, is dreamy, impulsive, and, as the film gently suggests, not quite attuned to the world in the way other people expect. She shot her husband Zackery, played by Hurd Hatfield, because, as she explains with disarming simplicity, she did not like his looks. Then, in the tradition of Southern manners, she offered him a glass of lemonade. Spacek delivers that story without winking at the audience. Babe is not performing eccentricity; she is simply telling the truth as she sees it, and that sincerity makes her hilarious and heartbreaking at once.
Beresford, working from Henley’s own screenplay, keeps the film close to its theatrical roots while opening it up to the Mississippi landscape. The sisters’ house, with its porch, kitchen, and garden, becomes a character in itself, a place full of memory, including the memory of their mother, who died by suicide years earlier, taking the family cat with her. The sisters have grown up with that loss, with a grandfather now in hospital after a stroke, and with a gossipy cousin, Chick Boyle, played by Tess Harper, who delights in their troubles. Spacek’s Babe moves through this house like a girl who has never quite left childhood, painting black dots on her toenails, dreaming of romance, and falling in love with a teenage boy, Willie Jay, played by David Carpenter. The affair, and Zackery’s attempt to end it, is what leads to the shooting, and Spacek never lets us forget that Babe’s actions, however comic they seem, come from loneliness and a desperate wish to be loved.
What makes Spacek’s performance so successful is its balance. Babe could easily become a caricature — the ditzy Southern girl, the comic relief — but Spacek plays her with complete seriousness. She listens, she daydreams, she reacts with wide-eyed wonder to her sisters’ problems, and she finds moments of unexpected wisdom. When Babe talks about her marriage, about feeling trapped, about wanting something more, Spacek’s voice softens, and the comedy gives way to sadness. That shift is the film’s emotional engine: these are funny women because they have had to be funny to survive, and their laughter is a way of holding grief at bay.
The ensemble is superb. Keaton’s Lenny is all nervous energy and thwarted tenderness; Lange’s Meg is all flair and regret; Harper’s Chick is deliciously awful. Sam Shepard, as Doc Porter, Meg’s former boyfriend, brings a quiet, wounded dignity. Yet Spacek stands out, partly because Babe is the catalyst for the reunion, and partly because she is the sister who most needs her sisters. The film’s famous ending, in which the three sisters hang a birthday cake together and laugh through tears, works because Spacek, Keaton, and Lange have made us believe in their bond. They are not perfect sisters, but they are each other’s family, and that is enough.
Crimes of the Heart was nominated for three Academy Awards, for Spacek, for Harper, and for Henley’s screenplay, and it remains one of the most beloved Southern comedies of the 1980s. It also marked a turning point for Spacek. After a run of intense dramas, she showed that she could lead a comedy-drama ensemble, hold her own alongside two other major actresses, and find humour in pain without diminishing it. For audiences who know her only from Carrie or Coal Miner’s Daughter, Babe Magrath is a delightful surprise: a character who is silly and serious, childlike and wise, and entirely, memorably, Spacek.
There is also a deeper sadness running through Crimes of the Heart that Spacek never lets the comedy erase. The Magrath sisters are funny because they have learned to laugh at lives that have not gone as planned. Lenny has sacrificed her own chances for family duty, Meg has chased a dream that has not quite come true, and Babe has married too young and sought love in the wrong place. Their mother’s suicide hangs over the house, not as a plot twist, but as a fact they have lived with since childhood. Spacek plays Babe as someone who understands that sadness intuitively, even if she cannot articulate it. When she talks about her husband, or about feeling trapped, or about wanting to be happy, her voice carries a wistfulness that makes the audience laugh less and listen more. That balance — comedy that does not deny pain, and pain that does not cancel comedy — is what makes Henley’s play so enduring, and it is what makes Spacek’s Babe more than a comic creation. She is a young woman trying, in her own confused way, to live a life that feels like her own, and her sisters, for all their teasing, recognise that struggle because they share it. The film’s final image of the sisters together is therefore not just charming; it is a small act of solidarity, three women choosing each other over the world’s judgement, and Spacek’s open, hopeful face is at its centre.