DIRECTOR
Michael Patrick Jann
SCREENWRITER
Lona Williams
PRODUCERS
Judy Hofflund
Gavin Polone
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Michael Spiller
MUSIC
Mark Mothersbaugh
EDITORS
David Codron
Janice Hampton
CAST
Kirsten Dunst (Amber Atkins)
Ellen Barkin (Annette Atkins)
Allison Janney (Loretta)
Denise Richards (Becky Ann Leeman)
Kirstie Alley (Gladys Leeman)
Sam McMurray (Lester Leeman)
Mindy Sterling (Iris Clark)
Brittany Murphy (Lisa Swenson)
Matt Malloy (Judge #1)
Nora Dunn (Colleen Douglas)
Mo Gaffney (Terry Macy)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 97m
U.S. release: July 23, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
|
Aside
from those involved, does anyone really take beauty pageants
seriously? It takes no particular courage to spoof a subject
that most people find ridiculous anyway; great satires like Dr.
Strangelove or Citizen Ruth find ways to make you
laugh at things (nuclear war, abortion) you never dreamed could
be funny. In Drop Dead Gorgeous, the glittering teenage
girls pose and dance, their teeth shiny from the Vaseline smeared
on them. The Vaseline is a nice detail -- beauty queens do actually
do that -- and I wonder what might have happened if the screenwriter,
Lona Williams, herself a former beauty-pageant contestant, had
stuck to the absurd nuts and bolts of what it takes to win these
things. I think, in fact, a straight documentary about a beauty
pageant might be funnier than this sometimes cartoonish mockumentary.
Not that the movie isn't funny. It has its moments -- it's just
that very few of them have much to do with the subject. We're
in Mount Rose, Minnesota, where people say "Yah" and
"You betcha" just like the people in Fargo,
and where the townies consider Minneapolis a "sin city."
Lona Williams hails from Minnesota, and her screenplay has a
slight whiff of I'm-glad-I-got-the-hell-out-of-there condescension,
like Michael Moore's Roger & Me; but then, nobody
said comedy had to be fair to be funny. We laugh at the brain-dead
people in these small towns because we know there are actually
people like that. But some of them are treated fondly, like Loretta
(Allison Janney), a whooping trailer-trash floozy who nonetheless
has her own dignity whether she's making a pass at a cute bartender
or going ballistic on a cheerful candy-striper; it helps that
Allison Janney, recently singled out for praise in Entertainment
Weekly's "If We Ran Hollywood" issue, projects
warmth and sanity no matter what she's doing.
Drop Dead Gorgeous purports to be a documentary covering
the Mount Rose teen beauty pageant, focusing on two girls in
particular: Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), an honest striver who
works as a morgue beautician and aspires to be Diane Sawyer,
and Becky Leeman (Denise Richards), a smiling bitch with no talent
to speak of -- except maybe on the Lutheran rifle range. Becky
is backed up by her monstrous mom (Kirstie Alley), a former pageant
winner who has groomed her daughter to follow in her footsteps;
Amber's own mom (Ellen Barkin) is an alcoholic wreck who loves
her daughter but isn't above whacking her with a beer can in
moments of stress. The pageant gets interesting when the contestants
start dying off in "accidents."
Actually, that's where the movie gets less interesting. Drop
Dead Gorgeous comes advertised as a black comedy, which has
come to mean that people die and you don't have to care. I would
have no problem with this, except that some of the victims --
like the one who dies in the thresher explosion -- seem so intriguing
upon introduction that it's a shame to lose them. We keep getting
thrown back to the main plot, Amber vs. Becky, and I have to
say that the movie is not a successful mockumentary: There are
just too many scenes that feel like scenes, too many instances
when you wonder why the camera is around. Lona Williams and the
first-time feature director, Michael Patrick Jann, don't have
a deadpan knack for making absurd situations seem real, as in
This Is Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman. They
also don't have the performers; Dunst is appealing, Richards
is appropriately vicious, but neither of them deliver their lines
as if they were real people on camera fumbling for the right
words. The movie has very little improvisatory feel; the one
exception is the incomparable Brittany Murphy (Clueless,
Freeway),
playing a spacey fellow contestant. Put a camera on her and she
always comes across as a real person.
The movie does have some mean, funny bits; it gets a lot of mileage
out of a big retarded guy, and I had fun spotting ace character
actors like Matt Malloy (In
the Company of Men) as a lascivious pageant judge who
denies having any prurient interest in the teenage girls, Sam
McMurray as Becky's oafish dad, and Mo Gaffney and Nora Dunn
as a pair of lushes who preside over an upper-level pageant-training
seminar (I was disappointed that Dunn's line about girls getting
breast implants at birth isn't in the movie). And in the scenes
dealing with last year's winner, a willowy girl now residing
in the local hospital's anorexia wing, Drop Dead Gorgeous
skates right up to the line dividing bad taste and atrocious
taste. People take eating disorders seriously, and for this movie
to make light of the subject is in extremely questionable taste
-- which is why those scenes stand out and suggest the truly
daring satire this might have been. When the anorexic girl is
wheeled on stage and lip-syncs to some schmaltzy ballad, the
moment is both dangerously funny and undeniably creepy. That,
I think, is the tone Drop Dead Gorgeous is aiming for;
it should have aimed more often. |