Directed by Michael Patrick Jann
Running time 98 mins
Certificate 15
For those with an interest in the psychology and sociology of Americana, it's been a reasonable month. First of all there was the insight into the arm lock placed upon small town American by high school football in Varsity Blues, now Drop Dead Gorgeous does the same for the beauty pageant.
Both films are powered by the same core conceit: that there is an unnatural and crippling fixation upon these two pursuits of youth, that blind adults to their own potential and bind the aspirations of the young. Basically, as Stan Marsh would say, it's pretty fucked up right here. For young men, the only method of escape from Pigsknuckleville is the football team: for young women, it's the trailer park and thirty unwanted kids unless they can pass the grade as an All-American Gal. Ironically, both films suggest, the only perceived way out is by excelling in these fields that only small town America admires.
It's in the approach to this social mechanic that the two films differ. Varsity Blues was a semi-serious drama, even if the trailer made it look like Porky's: The Revenge, which attacked the institution rather than the spirit of its subject. Drop Dead Gorgeous is a sociopathically vindictive black comedy, shot as a first person, Nick Broomfield style documentary, which claws deeply at the symptoms and structure of small town life.
Welcome to Mount Rose, a good old fashioned town in rural Minnesota. Home to honest Lutheran folk with a sense of community, always honest and decent, always there to take part and lend a hand. Yes, welcome to the world of gun clubs, meat raffles, trailer trash, racism, red necks and children throwing stones at the local 'tards. Welcome to Mittël America, home of the local heats of the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Company American Princess Beauty Pageant, in which every 17 year old girl wants to compete. Well, even if they don't, their mothers will have a word or two to say on the subject.
Now, like American Football, the beauty pageant is virtually alien to British culture, but it has long been synonymous even on this side of the pond with Main Street USA. However, most Britons just think it's a bit cheesy and maybe demeaning. Its darkest side, such as the murder of Jo Beth, parental brutality, sexual abuse, permanent psychological scarring, bulimia, anorexia and the vile underbelly of this curiously self-obsessed institution, that this movie sketches out so brilliantly. Written by long-time TV scripter and debut screen writer Lona Williams, a survivor of the Alabama pageant circuit herself, it's a vicious primer to a culture that aspires to five minutes of every hick in a twenty mile radius staring at your ass and then pocketing a $50 cheque for a vocational college.
The Mount Rose pageant is in the bag, and everyone knows it. Former pageant winner Gladys Leeman, wife of the most influential businessman in town and chair of the pageant committee, has spent 17 years training up her darling little Becky as her replacement. Everyone in between has just been keeping the tiara warm. Devoid of the long Dutch vowels of the local accent, prim, glistening, God-fearing and wholesome as all get out, she's a pageant winning machine. The only problem is that Amber Atkins, daughter of another former winner, is prettier, smarter and has a talent-section routine that's unbeatable. True, she's a tad trailer trash, but she's got that earnest underdog spirit. When a documentary team arrives in town to cover the competition, they just think they're getting some good material for the kind of public service work that only turns up at 5am on the big number, low ratings stations. That's when the bodies start turning up, all of them curiously connected to Amber. They were either stood next to her or where she was supposed to be or showed some kind of interest in her. It's almost as if somebody's trying to trim down her most serious opponent before she can deprive her precious daughter of the crown that is supposed to be hers. Damn if some white trash second rater is going to get in the way of her plan.
Superficially, the movie sits somewhere between the current group of high-budget teen comedies and the immature adult content of the post-Farrelly brothers crop of gross-out comedies. Yet it's not just a concoction of love interests and fart jokes: instead, it's a satire on a section of society that many people had assumed to be dead. The mockumentary format allows director Jann to push the comedic limits, occasionally dipping into what could be considered to be too dark or sadistic in a more conventionally shot movie. Some of the recent gross-out comedies, most noticeably There's Something About Mary have suffered from the often clumsy insertion of a barf-inducing set piece, which becomes cumbersome and over-shadows the rest of the film. Prior to this, only Very Bad Things has achieved the more satisfying sense of grand guignol, but Drop Dead Gorgeous achieves something much more insidious. Sporadically it dwells in far too glossy a way on the butts of its jokes, but in the moments when Jann stays within the conventions of the first person documentary, he displays a genius for calm observation.
It allows him a very fragmented narrative: after all, great documentaries, like the life they claim to depict, are often untidy and laden with characters that never realize their failings. Jann can follow a character until they have fulfilled their purpose, rather than tacking on a resolution. This leaves him free to make much more swinging attacks on characters such as the pageant judge who is always a little bit too fascinated by all this nubile flesh around him, yet never feel pressurized into having him reformed or punished. Similarly, a flat camera style, such as the well-established documentary introductory shot of a person stood in front of their house or place of work with a typed title card beneath them, gives him space for background comedy that more recently would have been left to dominate the scene. The entire narrative flow is a surprise, pushing onwards what would seem to be a natural resolution but then curling on for another twenty minutes that do not merely re-iterate but actually subvert what has gone before. It's this unpredictability, both of structure and of his commitment to the on-screen presence of a character, that fascinates the viewer.
It also allows the dozens of tiny characters that populate William's script to flourish in their own little cameos of insanity. After all, this isn't just a bitch fight between cheerleaders: it you aren't too obviously dysfunctional, deformed or pregnant, you'll be entered in the competition. Williams' script is scented with the weird experience of these girls and so is both compassionate and analytical about these weird small-town dreamers. It's a plethora of tiny moments, almost a more structured version of Slackers, with the girl with the bolt, the wrestling cheer-leader and improv art girl giving a frankly terrifying look into the psyche of the seventeen year old girl, without making it a mere freakshow.
It's Jann's real skill in not letting them overpower or be overpowered by the core performances of the battling contestants. Ellen Barkin as the elder Atkins is the definitive beer-swilling harridan, constantly being emotionally bailed out by the eternally under-rated Allison Janney as Loretta, the town letch to Barkin's town lush. It's virtually astounding to see Denise Richards, who looks to have been chronically miscast in the upcoming James Bond movie as someone who looks over the age of twenty, as Becky, the sneering little Miss Perfect, proving that she can actually act. However, the real conflict is between Amber and Gladys Leeman. As the truly hopeful young heroine, Kirsten Dunst could have just played her as the real perfection to Richards' vacuum molded monster, but she has the good sense to make her just foolish enough and just the right side of misguided to not seem artificial against Jann's general mood of spiteful disapproval. Yet the biggest revelation is in the performance of Kirstie Alley as the icily psychotic Gladys. Much like Jon Voight's malevolently fixated coach in Varsity Blues, she's a terrifying mix of wild and steely eyed, the ultimate in the mothers experiencing victory vicariously. For a woman that admits that her career has been based around a slightly fluffy flapping acting technique, it's a twisted role that evokes the too toothy by half grin of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom. If you can't see that for a recommendation, then this is so definitely not your film. You remember the liver-on-the-fire-iron sequence with any degree of fondness, beat down the screen door now.
RMW