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Review by Susan Granger
½ star out of 4
Mark Twain once said, "A soiled baby with a neglected nose
cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty." As a
corollary, this clumsy satire forces audiences to spend two hours with
Mona Hibbard, a vain, self-centered, thoroughly disagreeable
protagonist, played by Minnie Driver, in her grating quest for the
Miss America-like beauty pageant crown. Mona was born in a shack in
Naperville, Illinois, to white-trash parents who apparently tolerated
her passion for entering beauty contests while fostering her low
self-esteem. Now the mother of an illegitimate daughter, she passes
off the little girl (Hallie Kate Eisenberg, instantly recognizable
from Pepsi TV commercials) as the daughter of her best-friend/
room-mate (Joey Lauren Adams) - which becomes a problem when the
maternal care-giver implausibly winds up in jail. And we're supposed
to believe that the precocious child doesn't know who her real mother
is! Jon Bernstein's manipulative, cliche-filled screenplay sinks below
soap-opera, as Mona's secret could be exposed by an inquiring TV
reporter (Leslie Stefanson) whose own ambitions were thwarted by Mona
several years earlier in an incident involving dumping
industrial-strength adhesive on her flaming, twirling baton. Actress
Sally Field makes her directorial debut with this film; mercifully,
she can never sink lower. Nor can Kathleen Turner, inexcusably chewing
up the scenery as Mona's pageant mentor. There is one funny moment,
though, when Mona sings "The Wind Beneath My Wings" to a pregnant
woman about to give birth in a supermarket. On the Granger Movie Gauge
of 1 to 10, "Beautiful" barely manages a shallow 2. If you're
intrigued by beauty contests, rent Michael Ritchie's satirical "Smile"
or the more recent "Drop Dead Gorgeous."
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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out of 4
