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Why in the world would Sally Field, who won Best Actress Oscars for the serious dramas Norma Rae and Places in the Heart, would select for her feature directorial debut a script by the guy who wrote Jerry Springer’s Ringmaster is way beyond me. Why Minnie Driver would want to star in it is even more mysterious; Minnie’s sister Kate was even executive producer. You have to wonder if these people ever read things for themselves before signing $multimillion contracts, or if they blindly trust their agents and managers to do it for them.
Whatever the case, Beautiful is only now reaching Greenville a few weeks after barely cracking the boxoffice top ten then disappearing (I don’t understand that either – why are we getting something that nobody wanted to see, late, while the managers at Regal’s Hollywood 20 haven’t even heard of Best in Show, the new mockumentary from Spinal Tap and Waiting for Guffman conspirator Christopher Guest which was released the same weekend and at one point was earning 15 times as much money per theater). Minnie plays Mona Hibbard, a smalltown Illinois girl whose trashy upbringing can’t deter her from yearning to be a beauty queen. In a lengthy first act featuring Colleen Rennison (The Story of Us) as Mona at age 12, we learn of her singular covetousness for a tiara. Jump to seven years later, when Mona’s careless pregnancy, and a proclivity to sabotage other local pageant contestants, may be about to derail her ambitions. Jump seven more years, and her faithful friend and seamstress Ruby (Joey Lauren Adams) is mom to precocious Vanessa (Hallie Kate Eisenberg), who looks remarkably like Mona but has been raised by Ruby so Mona can continue pursuing the Miss American Miss title.
You see where this is going, right? No, how could you, because there’s an unbelievably jarring plot twist involving Ruby’s indictment for an apparent Death Angel murder at a nursing home, so Miss Illinois Mona has to take Vanessa along to the national pageant in Long Beach and try to keep her a secret. Suffice it to say the ending truly defies any possible definition of reality that Einstein, Schrodinger, or even Danielle Steel would recognize. Fields manages a couple scenes that hint at her imagination behind the camera, and Hallie Kate Eisenberg belies those now-obnoxious Pepsi commercials (both on TV and in theaters) to show more dramatic chops than did Haley Joel Osment in Pay It Forward, but overall this bizarre, uneven farce just made my stomach hurt. D+
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