Cinema: A Pageant To Die For

What should be put in a time capsule, the best of an age or the most brazenly typical? A Chuck Close painting or Drew Barrymore’s gluteal tattoo? If you’re looking for low familiar in a 1999 film, some concoction in which archetype meets stereotype, you might consider Drop Dead Gorgeous, a film that contains multitudes of better films in one disposable package. The other benefit of putting this instructively annoying dark comedy in a time capsule is that then no one would have to watch it.

A film team has come to Mount Rose, Minn., to document its annual Sara Rose Cosmetics(R)(c)[TM] Miss Teen Princess America Pageant. And this time it’s personal. The local doyen (Kirstie Alley) is ready to kill, really, to ensure that her daughter Becky (Denise Richards) will win over trailer-park cutie Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst). Got all the movie references? Here is a mockumentary (Waiting for Guffman, The Blair Witch Project) about a high school contest (Smile, Election) set among the funny-talking rubes of rural Minnesota (Fargo or every third episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000).

Lona Williams’ script has more lutefisk and Lutheran gags than a year of A Prairie Home Companion. Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann are as eager to deride Middle America, with its oppressively cheerful whiteness, as they were to exploit the area’s hospitality; the film was shot in half a dozen Minnesota towns. As Amber says, “The whole thing’s kinda sad and lame at the same time.”

Emerging valiantly from the debris are the two young stars. Dunst, 17, has grown up smartly before the camera; she has poise, wit and great dimples. Richards, 27 but plausibly teenish, uses her huge doll eyes (somehow calculating and dazed) and her brilliant teeth (all 50 or 60 of them, lined up like chorines ready to please the sugar daddies) to make Becky both the apotheosis and the parody of a precocious beauty-contestant pro. These are actresses worth watching, performances worth saving.

And when you pop Drop Dead into the time capsule, toss a reel of American Pie in with it. The guys from that movie and the girls from this one could tear one another apart.

–By Richard Corliss