Sweet Home Alabama

Parents need to know that Sweet Home Alabama is a 2002 movie in which Reese Witherspoon plays a NYC fashion designer who has returned to her rural Alabama small town. There's occasional profanity: "s--t," "d--k," "bitch," "piss," "bastard," and "t-t." Two gay characters (one out, one closeted) are positively portrayed, and when the closeted gay man is outed in public, his friends accept him without hesitation. References are made to an out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy. Melanie gets drunk at a bar, acts belligerent, vomits, and passes out. Drinking, vandalism, and minor crimes are portrayed as evidence of a free spirit. Unlike so many movies in which Southerners are portrayed as little more than punchlines or bullying bigots, even the minor characters have some depth that rise above these typical stereotypes, even if the movie sometimes comes off as trying a little too hard to prove its Dixieness, with a Confederate flag throw pillow here and a Winn-Dixie reference there.