Drop Dead Gorgeous 1999

[8.4/10] The central conceit that makes Drop Dead Gorgeous work is its subversion of the supposed wholesomeness of small town life. Rather than the fictional Mount Rose, Minnesota being a pure and innocent place, where decent people live well and quite differently from those heartless urbanites in the “Sin City”, it is its own complicated burg, full of kind folks and backstabbers and even murders.

That’s the comic exaggeration that helps make this one hilarious in addition to its dark satire of life in a small town. Drop Dead Gorgeous would still be an extraordinarily funny movie if it were just a low-stakes, Christopher Guest-style mockumentary about the distance between how important something like a teen beauty pageant truly is and how the residents of Mount Rose treat it like the most significant event in the world.

But writer Lorna Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann add a layer of grim absurdity on top of that to sweeten the humor and take it to exaggerated places that somehow make it all the more cutting. The murder mystery afoot, with hints that the members of the Leeman family are taking out their daughter’s pageant competition one-by-one, makes the film’s funhouse mirror help up against beauty competitions and insular cities that much more wild.

It’s also, like any movie released twenty years ago, pretty cringe-worthy at times. There’s some racist caricatures of Asian Americans. There’s ample slut-shaming of Leslie Miller (Amy Adams, in her film debut!). And most of all, there’s lots of running gags at the expense of a local mentally-disabled man, with plenty of slurs thrown around casually for good measure. Comedy, more than other genres, is so much of a product of the times and sensibilities in which it's made, that I try to compartmentalize this sort of stuff when I can, and some of the humor is more hacky and broad than out and out offensive. Still, they’re a collective comic blemish on an otherwise supremely funny film.

While a great deal of the humor comes from delightfully goofy routines -- like a “physical fitness” dance done on freshly-painted stools -- much of it is more situational, based on character or spoofing the hypocrisies inherent in the town’s glitter-soaked tug of war. The Leemans are the “perfect” family, but they’re also rigging the election. Their brood is populated by a phony lech of a furniture store proprietor and a back-stabbing Machievellian mom trying to live through her plastic, manicured daughter. Their wealth insultates them from consequences, but not from criticism, or the way their thinly-veiled racism, classism, and cravenness contradicts the image of wholesome purity they strive to project.

On the other side of that divide is Amber Atkins, who lives in a trailer park and works multiple part-time job to help make ends meet, but whose enthusiasm, intelligence, and above all else kindness and decency marks her and her allies as the Leemans’ moral betters, even if she falls below them in the social pecking order. Much of the films laughs, but also its drama and heart, comes from the disparity between the image the Leemans strain to project versus who they really are, in contrast to the genuine wholesomeness that Amber radiates despite not having the means to construct the spotless veneer of it like her erstwhile enemies.
There’s also plenty of great, well-observed bits about life in small town Minnesota. As someone who visits the state regularly, everything from simple references to bars and lutefisk, to the look and feel of small town gatherings and parades, are extra humorous in their accuracy. There’s a little condescension to the depiction, but also a firm dose of lovingly poking fun at something the creatives behind the film clearly know and experienced themselves.

At the same time, the effervescent gags, delightfully dark bits, and moments of real heart and humanity, are supported by a pageant stage’s worth of great talents in roles big and small. In particular, Kirstie Alley plays the conniving Queen Bee of the town with the perfect sugary, poison-tipped tone. Kirsten Dunst plays the girl next door who screams to high heaven over getting to stay at the Airport Howard Johnson without a hint of irony, which helps the laughs and the sweet moments land. And Allison Janey, as she is wont to do, nearly steals the show, with hilarious line-reads and expressions and kiss-offs that bring the yuks every single time she’s on screen.

She also plays one of the few characters who sees and tells it straight. She recognizes both how deserving Amber is of the crown, how she represents the best of Mount Rose, but also how the deck is stacked against her, and in favor of the big wealthy fish in this small pond. There’s an undercurrent of karma, maybe even divine intervention, at play to reverse that tilted playing field.

The Leemans literally wrap themselves in the symbols of Christianity, but have to violate multiple commandments to secure Becky’s victory. Meanwhile, Amber gets lucky break after lucky break for her kind nature, from unscathed tap dresses to bouts of food poisoning for competitors to (some very dark) good fortune landing her a dream anchor job following in the footsteps of Diane Sawyer. Janey’s character articulates the animating moral of the film -- that good things happen to good people.

But it also implies the reverse, that the wicked are punished, in increasingly bizarre and comic ways. Make no mistake, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a dark film. Plenty of young adults are killed; there’s running gags about one of the judges lusting after teenage girls; the film sports ample gags about the anorexia contestants are subjected to, and the whole thing ends with a deranged shootout. That black comedy works, however, in service of the movie’s satire, of that grim but ridiculous underbelly and realities to the competitions and events that try to project themselves as patriotic contests for the pure-at-heart.

In the end, though, whatever karmic force exists within the show’s world punishes the Leemans’ for their hypocrisy of not “buying American”, and loosens their grip on the town of Mount Rose. Most importantly, it frees Amber. The Rose Cosmetics Beauty Pageant isn’t just for bragging rights -- it’s a ticket out of this small town, with all its quirks, eccentricities, and bleak but hilarious ironies. The movie’s villains do everything in their power to rig the contest so that their chosen child can stamp that ticket, but even they cannot stifle Amber’s light or her path to greatness, and Drop Dead Gorgeous finds the laughs in every step.