Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Sweet Home Alabama (2002) Sweet Home Alabama is a Cinderella story with a twist: The successful heroine from humble beginnings gets the handsome prince but is not sure he is truly what she wants.

In the seven years since Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) left her small-town Alabama home, she has achieved impressive upward social mobility. Beginning as a daughter of the working class, she has become a world-famous fashion designer in New York City. As the film begins, the mayor’s son is courting Melanie. Andrew (Patrick Dempsey) proposes to her in Tiffany’s. She says yes, but before she can marry him she has to clear up a not-so-minor detail: She needs a divorce from Jake (Josh Lucas), the childhood sweetheart she left behind.

Most of the story unfolds back in rural Alabama. Melanie finds herself caught between two classes and two subcultures, and the film follows her struggle to reconcile her conflicting identities. Her dilemma will require her to acknowledge and reconnect with her mother (Mary Kay Place), who lives in a trailer park, while standing up to her future mother-in-law, the mayor of New York City (Candice Bergen).

In the end, Melanie returns to Jake, while Andrew, briefly heartbroken, pleases his mother by marrying a woman of his own class. Melanie’s homecoming does not, however, require that she return to life in a trailer park. She discovers that while she was in New York, Jake transformed his life. The working class “loser” built a successful business as a glass-blower. This change allows Melanie to imagine an upwardly mobile future by Jake’s side.

Sweet Home Alabama sends the message that people are happiest when they marry within their own subculture. That message is comforting because it helps the audience reconcile itself to two realities. First, although many people may want to “marry up,” most Americans do not in fact succeed in doing so. We tend to marry within our own class—and within our own religion and ethnic and racial group. Second, marrying outside your subculture is likely to be unsettling insofar as it involves abandoning old norms, roles, and values, and learning new ones. It is, therefore, in some sense a relief to learn you’re better off marrying within your own subculture, especially because you will probably wind up doing just that anyway.

There is an ideological problem with this message, however. Staying put in your own subculture denies the American Dream of upward mobility. Sweet Home Alabama resolves the problem by holding out the promise of upward mobility without having to leave home, as it were. Melanie and Jake can enjoy the best of both worlds, moving up the social hierarchy together without forsaking the community and the subculture they cherish. Sweet Home Alabama achieves a happy ending by denying the often difficult process of adapting to a new subculture as one experiences social mobility.