Drop Dead Gorgeous is one of my favourite films. It also made less than its $15m budget at the box office and only has a 45% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Jesus loves winners, as Gladys Leeman tells her daughter Becky, but I do understand why Drop Dead Gorgeous was not triumphant when it was released 20 years ago. Shot as a mockumentary, and indebted to John Waters and Christopher Guest, it follows a group of young, wannabe high school beauty queens as they compete in the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Mount Rose American Teen Princess pageant. Its humour is crude, its message is anarchic, its bite is vicious and its jokes don’t so much stretch the boundaries of taste as tap-dance all over them in a mortuary.
I loved it when I first saw it, as a VHS rental, and I treasure the tatty DVD of it still, even though it has been a long time since I owned a DVD player. Kirsten Dunst is Amber Atkins, an earnest teenager who works at the morgue and lives in a trailer park with her mother – Ellen Barkin, joyfully soused – and good-time gal neighbour Loretta. (Loretta, ever wise, never sentimental – “Do you think a nice cool mint would help if I shoved your head up your ass?” – is one of Alison Janney’s career-best performances, in a career that is not exactly short of choices.) Amber wants out of Mount Rose, Minnesota, so she can become a news anchor, just like her idol, Diane Sawyer. The pageant offers a scholarship as its prize. If she can tap-dance hard enough, it will be her ticket to somewhere else.
In the hands of writer Lona Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann, both first-timers (and Jann never directed another feature film) a story we should know inside out, a rags to riches fable in which the good girl should triumph, gleefully rips into itself. Amber should win the pageant, because she has worked the hardest and she’s the best. She deserves to win. She’s up against a coterie of clowns – a clumsy girl with a dog obsession and a delicate stomach, an American girl with a confused cultural identity, a deathly serious drama student, a heartbreaking, giggly Brittany Murphy as the younger sister of a closeted musicals obsessive and the requisite sex-crazy hot girl (Amy Adams, in her first screen role), shamelessly horny at all times, a walking anti-slut-shaming manifesto before we even knew what slut-shaming was.
But mostly, Amber is competing with Becky Ann Leeman (Denise Richards), the daughter of Mount Rose’s self-anointed king and queen (a wonderfully demented Kirstie Alley). Becky’s rivals start to disappear in an array of increasingly bizarre “accidents” – hunting season is particularly tricky, and who knew that a combine harvester could prove so lethal – and the competition becomes more than just a high school pageant. “Why do I think Becky’ll win? You’re talking about the richest family in a small town. It’s front page news when one of them takes a shit,” says Loretta. The message of the film isn’t that good will triumph. It’s that the game is always rigged. Becky wins the scholarship, because every one of the judges works for her father. She’s doesn’t even need it. Mount Rose had its very own college admissions scandal.
Drop Dead Gorgeous bombed at the box office, like a beauty queen riding a flammable giant Mexican swan, and the reviews from 1999 were damning. “Putting the words ‘drop dead’ in the title really is tempting fate,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. Roger Ebert opened his review with: “Sometimes I wonder how anyone could have thought a screenplay was funny enough to film.”
Taste is, of course, always subjective. Some will never see the humour in an anorexic pageant winner describing her competition prep (“I was practising my talent, finishing my costume, brushing up on current events and running 18 miles a day on about 400 calories. I was ready”), or in an operatic attack of shellfish-based food poisoning. But choosing bad taste is not the same as doing a bad job. Twenty years later, we live in a time that regularly confuses satire with endorsement, and Drop Dead Gorgeous may have been an early casualty of that. It was criticised for its shallow mockery of Minnesotans, which was seen then as sneering, but an excellent BuzzFeed feature from 2014 tracked down Lona Williams, and found that Amber Atkins’ story was not too far from her own. Even the stepladder dance routine was basically true.
And oh, the dancing. There are two scenes in Drop Dead Gorgeous that have me crying with laughter, and both involve dancing: Becky’s ballroom waltz with a crucified dummy of Jesus Christ himself, and the victory lap of poor reigning champion Mary Johanson, who needs the help of a nurse to wheel her around the stage. These are the essence of Drop Dead Gorgeous. It is unrestrained by decency. It is too dark to be cheerful, and too gleefully nihilistic to be glum. It is trashy, wonderful, endlessly quotable, and it was 20 years ahead of its time.
