Drop Dead Gorgeous is a darkly hilarious satire on small-town America, framed as a documentary about a local beauty pageant. In the words of the film’s tagline, “The battle between good and evil is bound to get ugly.”
A Bunch of Us are Going Cow-Tipping
Mount Rose, Minnesota is holding the local heats of the national “Sarah Rose American Teen Princess Pageant”, and the competition is fierce between the two likely winners; the chirpy, tap-dancing trailer-inhabiting Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) and the spoilt rich-bitch Becky Ann Leeman (Denise Richards.) Becky’s mother (Kirsty Alley) will stop at nothing to get her daughter the pageant title which she won twenty years ago, and the competition becomes a massacre, as the Leemans employ arson, sabotage and sniping to further their dreams of the Teen Princess crown.
The Richest Family in a Small Town
Like similar “mockumentaries” such as This Is Spinal Tap, or Best In Show, the humour in Drop Dead Gorgeous is completely deadpan. Viewers looking for obvious laugh-out-loud gags will be disappointed, as will fans of Team America-style gross-out humour – the jokes often depend on small-town prejudice, lack of aspiration and the awfulness of the world it depicts. A classic example occurs when Dunst’s character explains to the documentary team that she wants to go places – “Guys get out of Mount Rose all the time, for hockey scholarships...or prison.” and her mother barges into her bedroom to ask who the cameramen are and advise her “If they ask you to take your top off, get the money first.” Instead of cutting away right after the gag, the camera stays on Dunst, as she balances the embarrassment, humour and direness of the situation in an awkward pause. If you squirm easily, Drop Dead Gorgeous will be an uncomfortable film to watch.
We’re all God-Fearin’ People
The film is chock full of amusing performances, however, with Ellen Barkin as Amber’s mother, who understood that the father of her child chose his career over his family – “Once a carny, always a carny.” and Alison Janney as her beer-swilling mantrap of a neighbour. The hypocritical marriage between Kirsty Alley and Sam McMurray as Becky’s parents also provides some moments of bitter comedy – “His furniture’s as fake as my orgasms!”, and the parade of hopeful beauty queens plays up every parochial stereotype you could want to see pilloried. The emblem of the local Lutheran Sisterhood Gun-Club, with a rifle barrel forming the horizontal bar of the cross, cuts particularly close to the satirical bone.
Though it won’t be to everyone’s taste, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a classic of queasy deadpan comedy. It wouldn’t be half so funny if we weren’t afraid that it might be mostly true...
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