When it first came out, the dark, beauty-pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous was largely dismissed as a fitfully amusing comedy that lacked the improvisatory spontaneity that made the Christopher Guest films that inspired it so unique and special. Today, the film remains rough in some spots, but deserves to be re-evaluated as the rare social satire that has managed to become even more culturally relevant.
A large part of this is due to Kirstie Alley’s performance as a local Minnesotan pageant director/former beauty queen, who is only too happy to resort to murder to get her daughter into the state finals of the Miss Sarah Rose Cosmetics Pageant. Back in 1999, it seemed like Alley was channeling the dark side of Fargo’s Marge Gunderson (if only because of her accent), but now, it’s impossible to watch and not immediately be reminded of that inexplicable conservative icon Sarah Palin.
This uncanny coincidence causes the film’s many jabs at conservative “family values” to take on a newfound and occasionally disturbing piquancy. What may have once seemed overly broad now seems unfortunately believable in an age where conservative leaders such as Palin seriously decry the practice of advocating vegetables over junk food to school kids as a form of socialist liberal propaganda.
It also helps that the film features wonderful early performances from several young actresses who have since gone on to become an Oscar nominee (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Adams, playing a blonde cheerleading sexpot), a blockbuster star (Kirsten Dunst in full-on adorable-saint mode), a tabloid/reality-show train wreck (Denise Richards, whose natural, on-camera vacancy is, for once, used to great comic effect) and a corpse (a sadly underused Brittany Murphy, who has the film’s best throwaway line when she cheerfully admits her parents only had her because her brother needed a kidney).
While still not up to the comedic levels of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman or A Mighty Wind, Drop Dead Gorgeous deserves to be revisited if only to appreciate how much can change and stay the same in the span of a decade. —Allan Mott