Drop Dead Gorgeous Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)July 22nd, 1999
DROP DEAD GORGEOUS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
New Line Cinema
Director: Michael Patrick Jann
Writer: Lona Williams
Cast: Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Allison Janney, Brittany Murphy, William Sasso, Amy Adams, Dylan Bullard, Nora Dunn, Michael McShane, Mindy Sterling Adam West
While you're still trying to figure out the answer to the classic philosophic question, "If a tree falls in the forest with no witnesses, does the tree make a sound?" you can ponder yet another one. If a movie billed as a comedy has not a single laugh, can it still be called a comedy? This movie is yet another parody of the type of event that is itself so asinine it needs no satirist. "Drop Dead Gorgeous"--so named to exploit a double meaning (one of which being an implicit quote from the principal character, "Drop dead, gorgeous"--this film features vulgarity for its own sake rather than crudeness in the pursuit of humor. The inspiration for the movie is perhaps Michael Ritchie's 1975 production "Smile," which spotlighted a superior cast including Bruce Dern, Barbara Feldon and Melanie Griffith centering on behind-the-scenes activity at a California "Young American Miss" pageant. While "Smile" symbolized the emptiness of American middle-class existence, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" goes after targets too vulnerable to defend themselves, including the mentally retarded, the deaf, poor Mexicans, anorectics, small town rubes and trailer trash. In taking pot shots at rural hollowness, director Michael Patrick Jann does not even opt for the miscarried outrageousness of Harmony Korine's plotless dud "Gummo"--about poor white trash in a desolate Ohio town whose citizens get their jollies from shooting cats and selling the bodies to the local supermarket.
"Drop Dead Gorgeous" features Kirstie Alley in the role of Gladys Leeman, the town's richest women, who is emceeing a teen beauty contest but is hardly impartial. Her
own daughter, the vacuous Rebecca (Denise Richards), has been trained by Gladys to push all the right buttons to score points with the judges.
To get a measure of the numbing inauspiciousness of Alley's performance as an assassin, one need only compare her dispatch of the hackneyed role with that of Holly Hunter--who won an Emmy for her portrayal of the obsessed Houston housewife who plots to kill her daughter's competitors for spots on the cheerleading squad in Michael Ritchie's "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom."
Directed like Myles Berkowitz's "20 Dates" as a mock documentary, scripter Lona Williams's story spotlights Alley's ineptitude but focuses as well on the two 17-year-olds considered the leading contestants in a teen beauty pageant held in a heartland Minnesota town. The confident Rebecca Leeman (Denise Richards) is pitted against a perpetual motion machine, Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), the contestants now numbering eight when one of the girls is mysteriously burned to death in a tractor accident. Though the two major contenders are from different sides of the track in the town of just over 5,000 people, they are equally ambitious. Ultimately, Amber will conclude the movie in a scene that recalls Tracy Flick's triumph in "Election." Director Jann is himself attempting ineffectually to capitalize on that film's critical and box office success.
While vulgarity need not be off-putting and can, in itself, be the source of considerable humor (witness the hilarious inventiveness of "South Park" and "American Pie"), in "Drop Dead Gorgeous" the boorishness is plain obtuse. Examples: Amber gleefully dances about the room of a funeral home while she tackles her evening job as an embalmer. The teen queen of 1945 is taped moaning that after she won, she "did not even get to keep my damn tiara--I had to turn it in for scraps." The billboard that announces the town to drivers has an obsolete picture of its "oldest living Lutheran," but the mayor groans that "sons of bitches would not even remove the sign." Two enormously fat guys--one a judge, the other his mentally challenged brother--slap each other around for a while. A dance instructor teaches the teens their steps while dangling a cigarette from her lips. Later, when one of the other judges, disgusted with the disabled man's behavior, asks rhetorically, "Why don't you leave him with a sitter," he gets the answer, "That's not nice--you know the sitter is dead." And when Amber's trailer mysteriously catches fire, her mom, Annette Atkins (Ellen Barkin), is seriously burned, her can of beer soldered to her hand.
One of the questions asked of the contestants by a judge is "If you were a tree in the forest, what would it be?" Here's another one--for the production team: "If you were asked to turn out a comedy, when do you think you could arrange it?"
Rated PG-13. Running Time: 96 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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