 An English girl (Suzanna Hamilton) comes to America to join her American husband (Peter MacNicol) in a Pennsylvania coal town in the late 1950 s. She faces the ire of her new mother-in-law (Colleen Dewhurst), a former Hungarian with different ideas about the life and culture that her son should have. Jason Robards also appears as the man s father and Kathy Bates plays his dim-witted sister.