Trite trio: Driver, Field and Pepsi girl less than 'Beautiful'

By Wilhelmina Mauritz

For The Daily

What exactly is beautiful? This is the question that "Beautiful" tries and fails to answer. The movie revolves around Mona Hibbard (Minnie Driver) who has only one goal in life and that is to win the Miss America Miss Beauty Pageant (basically our Miss America). As a young girl, Mona's world is solely focused on the next beauty pageant. Her room is adorned with hundreds of pictures of girls in beauty contests and even her mirror has inspirational quotes around it, saying things like "you can do it" and "hang in there baby!"

Mona comes from a broken home. Her mother is an alcoholic and in place of her real father is her mother's live-in boyfriend (possibly husband we don't ever know) who is a fat slob that is more interested in spending his nights in Mona's bed than her mother's. Not surprisingly, Mona is a very unhappy girl. She only has one friend, Ruby (played by Joey Lauren Adams from "Chasing Amy"), who is basically a saint disguised as a human. She states right off to Mona that "whatever I got, it's yours" and follows through with that promise to the end.

Ruby is basically the mother that Mona never had. She stands by her no matter what happens and always goes above and beyond the call of duty. Early on in the movie, Mona finds herself pregnant and distressed since she knows that she can't continue on with her beauty pageants due to the fact that contestants are not allowed to have children. What does Ruby do? Well of course she takes the child and raises little Vanessa (Hallie Kate Eisenberg) as if she were her own. Now you're wondering who would actually do this? So was I. As is the case with many things in this movie, it's all for the convenience of the plot.

"Beautiful" seems to have one contrived incident after another that just ends up being so blatantly ridiculous that you, as an audience member, feel as though you're being pushed through the movie's plot with one choppy scene after another, instead of watching a solid flow of action.

There is a total lack of connection between any of the movie's characters - this is mainly due to the fact that the star of the film is very unlikable. She uses everyone around her and finds the value in people only in how much she can get out of them. Basically you find yourself not really caring what happens to her. Minnie Driver does a wonderful job playing Mona and it is unfortunate that the awful premise and story line of "Beautiful" overshadow her terrific acting abilities.

A slight saving grace for this movie is the young actress Hallie Kate Eisenberg who plays Vanessa, Mona's little girl. You might recognize her from those annoying Pepsi commercials but don't hold those against her. Although extremely irritating in the commercials, she is surprisingly great in this movie. She was the most real thing about this movie and by far the most perceptive character in "Beautiful."

The main problem with this movie is that it tries too hard to seem so deep and meaningful and like any beauty pageant on the surface everything appears great and surprisingly flawless, but the deeper you look into the heart of the film, the more you find that there's nothing there. It lacks so much follow-through that in the end, you really find yourself wondering what the movie was even about. Is it trying to make some deep meaningful commentary on the realities of true, inner-beauty? Is it trying to make a statement about single-mothers? Is it trying to reveal all the deceptiveness and absurdity that surrounds beauty pageants (shocking though it may be)? Who knows - this movie certainly doesn't.

Courtesy of Destination Films

Hold me closer, Minnie Driver: The baby won't be the only one crying after viewing the schlockfest that is Sally Field's 'Beautiful.'