Beautiful

This is a terrible movie, featuring bad acting in the service of a poor script featuring dislikable characters. It is further handicapped by Sally Field’s amateur-hour direction, and suffused throughout with the dispiriting sense that the filmmakers actually thought they were making a meaningful picture. Rarely has a project been so misguided. In a prologue that goes on way too long, we are introduced to Mona, a young girl from a dysfunctional household, who is so obsessed with beauty pageants that winning them becomes her life’s mission. Apparently this justifies her being completely insufferable to everyone else around her, and this continues even after she grows up to be Minnie Driver. Mona will do anything to win, which means that when she gives birth to a daughter, Vanessa, she hands the child over to her best friend Ruby (Adams) to raise as her own, because, of course, beauty pageants don’t allow Moms to participate. Through a combination of pluck and scheming, Mona actually wins her state pageant, meaning she gets to go to the (fictional) Miss American Miss Pageant in sunny Long Beach, California. When her own mother refuses to accompany her on the trip, she takes Vanessa (the irrepressible Hallie Kate Eisenberg--that little girl from the Pepsi commercials) instead.

It comes as no surprise that she has to rethink her life goals and priorities. (Let me stop here to say a word about Minnie Driver. Driver is a good actress and a very attractive woman, but no one would mistake her for a beauty queen. I suppose it means that when a star agrees to appear in your movie, you take her, no matter how miscast.) Writer Jon Bernstein seems not to have the slightest idea of what he was after here. The picture veers uneasily between a satire of the beauty pageant industry (a ripe target, to be sure, but one which has been satirized in other, better movies), an indictment of same, a condemnation of the objectification of women in American popular culture, and the story of a young woman struggling to break free of her past and find her one true self. Since the picture can’t seem to decide which of these it really wants to pursue, it ends up failing miserably on all counts. Sallie Field must have thought she could bring her own brand of “you like me; you really like me” charm to the proceedings, but she couldn’t have picked a worse project to choose for her debut. It’s definitely more smarm than charm.

Driver is just plain bad in her role as the prototypical poor white trash gal; she was no doubt poorly directed, but she chose the crummy part and she has to live with the consequences. The appealing Joey Lauren Adams (“Chasing Amy”) doesn’t fare much better as too-good-to-be-true friend Ruby, who seems to be petitioning for sainthood, and has some serious self-esteem problems of her own (and who is removed from the story by the most ridiculous of plot contrivances). Even Kathleen Turner gets burned in her clichéd cameo as an instructor to aspiring beauty queens. In fact, the only one who maintains any appeal at all is young Eisenberg, who has a very natural presence on screen, even when everything else is collapsing around her. (But then, she is too young to recognize catastrophe when she sees it, and probably too innocent to be bothered by it.) The picture stumbles from one irritating scenario to another, illuminating neither the characters nor the theme, and failing to entertain in the process. The attempts at humor are so forced as to be painful to watch, and the overall design of the picture is dreary and uninspired. Mona is so unlikable, and her conversion so unconvincing, that the movie can’t even rise to the level of mawkish, which is another way of saying that this is one pageant you should definitely skip. (10/8/2000)