Film Review
Murder in a Small Town: A Comedy
In 1995, in the tiny town of Mt. Rose, Minnesota, two seventeen-year-old girls were killed while competing in a local beauty pageant. “Hilarious” might not be the word one would use to describe such an event, unless you’re talking about the 1999 dark comedy “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” a mock-documentary about the world of a small Midwestern town and their annual teen beauty pageant.
Beauty pageants, especially those for young girls and teens, have long held the public’s fascination. From the morbid, curious look into the short-lived life of Jon Benet Ramsay to the gleefully shared viral videos of pageant girls fumbling their way through question and answer segments, pageants seem at best, relics of a pre-feminism era and at worst, an opportunity for desperate people to act terribly. However, to the residents in a small town, where traditional gender roles are often still stubbornly clung to, competing in a beauty pageant is not only the height of glamour and sophistication, but also simply a rite of passage. As pageant contestant Lisa Swenson explains to the camera early in the film, “If you're seventeen and you're not a total fry, it's just what you do.”
Pageants are a sport. Contestants train, buy special outfits, and travel many miles to compete, winning-obsessed parents can live vicariously through their children, and to those less fortunate, winning a pageant can be seen as “a ticket out.”
One of those contestants looking to escape is Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst). Amber is a kind soul with a love of tap-dancing and Diane Sawyer; she hopes winning the pageant will catapult her out of Mt. Rose to behind the desk of a nationally televised nightly news show, a la Ms. Sawyer. Amber lives in a trailer with her trashy but well-meaning mother, Annette (Ellen Barkin), who runs a salon out of their home and spends her days drinking and gossiping with neighbor Loretta (Allison Janney). Amber also works to help make ends meet, both by scraping lunch trays in her high school cafeteria and doing what she calls “the hair and makeup on the deceased” at a local funeral parlor. Amber and Annette are whom come to mind when you think “small town” – decent, good-hearted, and poor.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Leeman family. Helmed by caustically sweet mother Gladys (Kirstie Alley) and mildly-racist father Lester (Sam McMurray), they and their prized only child Rebecca (Denise Richards) live in a McMansion and want for nothing, thanks to Lester’s thriving furniture business.
Gladys, a past pageant winner, runs Mt. Rose’s American Teen Princess pageant every year and makes no bones about how excited she is that Rebecca is competing. Lester’s store has put up the prize money and Gladys has handpicked the judges who are connected to the Leemans in one way or another: there’s Harold and Hank Vilmes, two brothers who were recently hired by Lester for a high-paying job, Lester’s meek, terrorized secretary Jean who literally says nothing during the entire movie, and skittish John Dough who chain-smokes and desperately tries to convince the documentary crew he’s not a pedophile. So Becky Leeman’s a shoo-in, right? Loretta thinks so, telling the documentary crew, “You’re talking about the richest family in a small town. It’s front page news when one of ‘em takes a sh*t.”
But Becky has stiff competition: not just in Amber, but also in jock girl Tammy Curry. While Tammy may not be glamorous, she’s accomplished; she’s the captain of the Varsity soccer team, she runs track, and she’s recently unseated Becky as the president of the Lutheran Sisterhood Gun Club.
At the end of pageant registration day, as the sun sets on Tammy’s family’s farm, we watch her drive her family’s thresher as her voiceover explains how confident she is that she’ll win when suddenly – and I promise this is not a spoiler – the thresher explodes. Tammy’s dead; her demise quickly ruled an accident and everyone moves on – except for Amber, who’s convinced Tammy was murdered. Now that she’s Becky’s toughest competition, does Amber drop out of the pageant to save herself or risk her life to achieve her dream?
While this may not sound particularly funny, Lona Williams’ hilarious script, Michael Patrick Jann’s skillful directing, and the cast’s grounded performances make for a darkly comedic film that is as realistic as possible, considering the absurd premise.
Clearly this film was cast to highlight two of 1999’s hottest young actresses: Kirsten Dunst and Denise Richards. Dunst was coming off a string of popular teen movies and had just starred in Sophia Coppela’s “The Virgin Suicides” while Richards was at the height of her popularity after starring in the psycho-sexual thriller “Wild Things.” This might explain why they were the only performances I didn’t care for. Watching them felt like I was watching two famous people pretend to be in a documentary. Dunst struggles with her Minnesotan accent, leaning on it so hard at times, she sounds cartoony and Richards looks too mature to be a believable seventeen-year-old. The good news is this film is an ensemble piece. Barkin and Alley play their characters straight, thus heightening the comedy and keeping both Annette and Gladys from devolving into caricatures. Janney, who is always brilliant in any role she takes on, shines as the lusty, middle-aged Loretta and skilled improviser Mindy Sterling is perfect as Iris, Gladys’ sycophantic right-hand-(wo)man. The actors portraying the other pageant contestants (which include a young Amy Adams in her first movie role and Brittany Murphy to tragically passed away in 2009) embody their roles with grounded ease.
Director Michael Patrick Jann culls realistic performances out of everyone, even the big stars. Though this film still has a big budget feel, it also has that loose, shaky, handheld quality of a documentary being filmed on the fly. He mixes traditional documentary-style “talking head” interviews and b-roll with “found footage” (bystander videos) and “borrowed footage” (news reports), and his use of chyrons (captions added to the screen to identify people and clarify situations) are realistic and lead to one of the funnier moments in the film involving mentally-challenged Hank getting stuck in a car door.
Speaking of Hank, since “Drop Dead Gorgeous” is eighteen years old, some of the jokes could offend audiences of today. The word “retard” is used liberally, especially when referring to Hank, jokes are made at the expense of Mary, the reigning Mt. Rose American Teen Princess, and her crippling anorexia, and about fifty percent of the characters in the film smoke. But these “problematic” elements help ground the film even more and provide a more realistic view of humanity, which is often messy, offensive, and sometimes even homicidal.
