Drop Dead Gorgeous (97 minutes)
"And that's why we Lutherans use grape Kool-Aid for the blood of Christ."
Welcome back to The 90-Minute Movie! The newsletter dedicated to short runtimes and tight scripts. I wrote this post while the East Coast was experiencing twice the amount of our average rainfall and New York City was flooding. It was nice to have an excuse to watch a lot of movies. And to sleep. And ok, to watch a ton of crime documentaries, too. Since then an earthquake and an eclipse have occurred so there’s no way of knowing what could happen next out here.
I talk a lot about the dark, female-led comedies of the 90’s. Movies like Jawbreaker, Heathers, and Cruel Intentions were formative sleepover-era movies for me and my peers. But the thing about being young in the 90’s was that your exposure to movies was limited. You found out about them via your parents, your friends, or, most iconicly, the video store. This is how I know Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) managed to allude me (until now). It simply never entered my orbit and then was washed away by time until streaming brought it back to life. It’s regained so much popularity recently, that I was able to watch it on a recent Delta flight.
There is so much I could say about how poorly received this movie was when it was released, but then I’d be echoing most of what I wrote in my Jawbreaker piece. Ebert (and other critics) hated it-- unable to see past the fact that these movies aren’t made for them-- and it never found its audience until later making the rounds on VHS like so many movies did at the time. Its poor reception nearly crushed both the writer (Lona Williams) and director (Michael Patrick Jann). Williams would try again with the also poorly received Sugar & Spice, and Jann, while a very successful TV director, would give up on movies altogether.
So, what is it about this movie that was so damning? Well, it’s not exactly “tasteful”, but it is very funny. A documentary crew arrives in Mount Rose, Minnesota to film the contestants of the Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant. The competitors are Becky Leeman (Denise Richards) the daughter of the richest man in town and the woman running the competition (Kirstie Alley), Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst) a working-class girl with two jobs who lives in a trailer with her mom Annette (Ellen Barkin), sweet and silly Lisa Swenson (Brittany Murphy), and overtly sexual Leslie Miller (Amy Adams). When a contestant is killed in a thresher explosion, the documentary crew starts to capture that the quaint town and its beauty pageant aren’t all that they seem; the girls competing are in many ways fearful for their lives. Especially Amber who poses a significant threat to Becky… and Becky seems suspiciously linked to all the “accidents” going on around town.
Drop Dead Gorgeous is somehow simultaneously ahead of its time and behind the times. On one hand, it makes significant commentary about the lives of teenage girls in small towns and their options for “getting out” (which are few and far between). Characters like Amber and Loretta, Annette’s best friend (played by the incredible Allison Janney) have real depth and complexity. I don’t believe all of that interest exists in the script but the casting and performance of these two talented actors is a majorly redeeming quality.
On the other hand, two of the running gags wear out their welcome almost immediately. Will Sasso plays Hank, an intellectually disabled townsperson and brother of one of the pageant judges. Hank serves no plot purpose and is about as embarrassing as you can imagine. I find nothing rewarding about having this character in the movie. You could cut him out and have the same movie.
The other gag involving anorexia is a bit more entwined in the plot.
(Before I continue I’m putting a big TRIGGER WARNING for eating disorders here if you’d like to skip down to the next paragraph.)
Alexandra Holden plays Mary Johanson, the previous year’s pageant champion. Mary is hospitalized for her anorexia for most of the movie, only being released in a wheelchair to pass her crown on to the next winner. There are shades of important commentary around Mary (beauty standards and pageants, blah blah) but they are all but erased by pretty tasteless jokes about her not eating and her hair falling out. I am all for biting sarcasm, but for Drop Dead Gorgeous they should have stuck to jokes about middle America. The movie simply doesn’t have the mind to pull it off.
It’s interesting to note that the treatment of Hank and Mary caused very little stir at the time, but the moment Becky Leeman (Richards) dances on stage to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” with a giant Jesus on the crucifix, people lost their shit. Extras even walked off set that day! I on the other hand laughed hard at this moment, and I believe these are the kind of off-color jokes that work for this movie. These are jokes that have ultimately made it so beloved over the years.
If you read any other commentary on this movie, you’ll see that its harsh criticism of small-town America spoke to outcasts all over. While to me this is no Jawbreaker or Heathers, Drop Dead Gorgeous didn’t deserve the absolute teardown it got in the late 90’s. The mockumentary style of filming allows for some really funny moments and bits (there’s a running Cops gag that has an awesome payoff) and I can’t stress enough just how good Dunst and Janney are in this film. Despite the biting criticism of middle America, these two women come out not as tragic characters (as would have been easy to do), but as heroes.
It is a crime just how underappreciated this movie is. After seeing it, it's one of my top 10 comedies. It's one of those movies that if I just think about it, I'll start laughing to myself.
I never saw this movie until a few years ago. My wife was a fan of it growing up, and it was playing at a local indie theater near our house. Unbeknownst to me, there is a Dallas LGBTQ movie club who does a screening of something once a month, and they were showing Drop Dead Gorgeous. The crowd was probably 3/4 gay guys, many of whom dressed up in pageant gowns. Trust me when I tell you, this is the ONLY way to see the movie. It wasn't quite a Rocky Horror style audience participation, but it was pretty close. I was laughing so hard I was crying just at the movie, and the whole crowd being people who were just there to have a good time and see a movie they loved with their friends made it even better.
A seminal film for young gays learning their taste and sensibility. I was obsessed and still am!