Miss Congeniality
A Winning Smile
Note: I am doing something in this review that I very seldom, if ever, do. In the first paragraph of this review, I reveal details about the ending of the Sandra Bullock movie, Miss Congeniality.
Normally, I have a horror and fear of revealing what are called “spoilers” in movie reviews. (This is no small problem; it has kept me from a lucrative career editing movie trailers.) I don’t like giving away spoilers — even for movies that are already spoiled — and I don’t like people who do.
However, I am breaking my normal rule for this movie, and I am confident that I have good and sufficient reason to do so. I believe that the climactic comic scene of Miss Congeniality is the key to understanding some basic truths about the movie, and that the scene is funny enough to justify the weaknesses of the movie, and that if you watch the movie you’re going to pretty much be able to predict what’s going to happen anyway.
Nevertheless, because this is such a departure from my usual practice, and because I recognize that some people may wish to be surprised by the ending — good luck — I am providing this notice so that anyone who wishes can stop reading at this point if they so choose.
You have been warned.
If you want to stop reading now, you won’t hurt my feelings.
Are you sure?
OK, then.
Because here we go…
To its credit, Miss Congeniality is a movie that knows exactly, precisely where it wants to go. Its destination is the final awards ceremony for the Miss United States scholarship contest (please, not “beauty pageant”). It wants to show its star, Sandra Bullock, as one of the five final contestants, dressed in an evening gown and high heels and her hair up, a huge phony smile plastered on her face, which is funny. It wants to have William Shatner singing the pageant theme, and anyone who has heard Shatner butcher “Mr. Tambourine Man” knows that this spectacle is funny. It wants one of the losing contestants to throw a fit and be carried off the stage, which is funny. And it wants the whole pageant to explode — literally — into unrestrained comic mayhem involving savage cat-fights between Bullock and the other contestants.
This is hilarious.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with where the movie is going; everyone who has watched an entire beauty pageant must somewhere in their hearts wish for the whole affair to degenerate into a farcical hair-pulling slugfest. The question about Miss Congeniality is whether or not moviegoers will want to follow the movie as it takes the steps that it needs to get to that destination.
The first step the movie must take is to separate its star from the beauty-pageant setting. Beauty pageant contestants, along with spoiled heiresses, vapid trophy wives, and snooty socialites, are exactly the type of woman at which Hollywood likes to sneer. Hollywood, if the recent Oscars are any guide, likes its actresses to play confident women who challenge social norms (Julia Roberts, Kate Hudson, Juliette Binoche) or brainy career women who are unfairly treated by the men in their lives (Laura Linney, Joan Allen, Marcia Gay Harden), or to be Dame Judi Dench. Miss Congeniality is not about to depart from this received wisdom, is not about to put its star in a position where people can sneer at her. Therefore, Bullock’s character is — surprise! — a brainy, confident career woman who is challenging social norms while dealing with unfair treatment; she’s an FBI agent.
Now that you’ve got Bullock’s character separated from the denizens of the beauty pageant circuit, the next challenge is how to fit her back into that circuit, thereby creating that best-beloved Hollywood cliche; the fish-out-of-water movie. This is done by creating a (largely imaginary) threat to the contestants, a threat of harm that can only be avoided by sending an FBI agent to deal with it — not as a pageant official or a reporter or even as a makeup consultant, but undercover, as Miss New Jersey.
That’s the set-up; the rest of the movie is dependent on Bullock’s considerable comic charms and the good work of her supporting actors. Bullock is a decent comic actress. She can handle the pratfalls and the sharp, sarcastic dialogue with equal facility. More importantly, she’s believable both as a spunky, sloppy FBI agent and as a beauty queen with a thousand-watt smile. The bright spots of the movie, however, come from the professional comic actors. William Shatner was an inspired choice for his relatively small role, enough so that he may be able to make a third (fourth? fifth?) career out of hosting pageants. Candice Bergen is adequate as the nasty-yet-proper pageant chairwoman. And Michael Caine, in the Henry Higgins role, steals the show as a disgraced pageant advisor who coaches Bullock with an ill-concealed sadistic glee.
However, Miss Congeniality has more than its share of uneven spots. The worst problem is Benjamin Bratt as the obligatory Romantic Interest. He’s asked to play a pretty-boy FBI agent who isn’t really bright enough for his job; a portrayal that rings false to all true “Law & Order” fans. Bratt shows as much enthusiasm for this part as he did for his most recent role as Julia Roberts’s boyfriend at the Oscars. He and Bullock have no romantic chemistry to speak of, and it might have been better to leave his part on the cutting-room floor. The other problem is the movie’s portrayal of the beauty pageant contestants. Miss Congeniality loses what satiric edge it has when it needs it most. While there’s no need for the movie to be mean-spirited and cruel to its contestants — I am thinking here of Christopher Guest’s Best in Show — Miss Congeniality could have done a much more thorough job of exploiting its comic opportunities. Instead of being — how shall I put this — vain, competitive, shallow, catty, manipulative and entirely self-absorbed, the contestants are nice, and inoffensive, and maybe just a little bit compulsive, but in a cute way, and really nice people once you get to know them, and it’s just not what I expected.
But, of course, the biggest comic opportunity is the ending, and here, if nowhere else, Miss Congeniality delivers on its considerable promise. Although the road that Miss Congeniality takes is predictable and uneven, it’s a comic journey that, for the most part, is worth taking.