The issue of female beauty and its attendant competitions was dealt with to an extent in Sally Field’s affecting directorial debut Beautiful. Its main thesis was that its lead character’s drive to succeed had to do with her desperate need for attention and, by extension, her deep dislike of herself.
Perhaps that metaphor could be extended to most “driven” people, but thereafter the film had to somehow pull its punch and advocate that women who have had children are also eligible for beauty competitions, which is like saying a lousy president should resign at the end of his term.
Sandra Bullock, however, is an altogether more astute observer, producer and performer and, if Beautiful was meant ironically, then Miss Congeniality is a near-perfect send-up of the ugly duckling notion of beauty. Also, if the former was lacking in the male department, then Bullock doesn’t seem to have that problem whatsoever. Take for example her previous outing as an actor/producer – and by all accounts she is a hands-on producer, not just some “talent” attaching her name to money. In Gunshy she cast the allegedly well-hung Liam Neeson as the FBI agent who has lost his nerve, joins a men’s group and has to go for a proctal
probe. Guess who is the straight-faced nurse who has to administer that rather painful procedure?
She does something very similar in Miss Congeniality, and this time it’s to the future Mr Julia Roberts, Benjamin Bratt, who plays a sexily pleasant but somewhat conventional – spot the pattern – FBI colleague. She is agent Gracie Hart, a complete and utter slob, except when it comes to working and fighting – her wrestling bout with Bratt on a gym mat early on is not only playfully serious, it is also erotically charged and cleverly sets up later events.
As for the plot, when it’s calculated that a serial killer is going to kill the winner of the Miss United States Pageant, the only person on the otherwise all-male team who has the right figure (not to mention sex) to mingle with and protect the finalists is Gracie, who is, of course, perfectly graceless.
That serial killers change their modus operandi every time they strike is a moot point, but this is a comedy. Michael Caine comes flaking on as a beauty consultant and calls her “Dirty Harriet”; Candice (Murphy Brown) Bergen plays the kind of embittered organiser who could only be a past queen; and William (Star Trek; 911) Shatner is the rather dreamy MC doing his last show and keeps it going on – brilliantly – as things fall apart, literally.
Another clever touch in Mark Lawrence’s slightly uneven script is that Gracie goes from considering the beauty-queens-to-be a “bunch of bikini stuffers who only want world peace” to feeling a kind of sisterly empathy for them. She comes to understand their need for 15 minutes of fame, their primal need to attract. And if she is still sending them up in this satisfying comedy, then she is sending up another species even more: men, as represented by that traditionally male and deeply anal institution, the FBI.