Becca appears to have it all: the hunky boyfriend who dotes on her (and Omigahd he proposed!); a chandelier-shattering voice that goes down well at the local bar; a great job teaching chill-drenn, validated by the 'Teacher of the Year' award; and an adoring family and friends. Should be enough for someone who's essentially a loud, large, brassy, not very pretty Jewish princess.
But no - a skinny, classically good-looking blonde shiksa disses her looks, and so Becca has to beat her at one game she's utterly ill-equipped for: a beauty pageant.
!Spoiler for anyone who didn't see it coming! Happily for her, the miracle of movie magic makes it all possible - ignoring any more realistic scenario in which a woman like her would be blown off in seconds for not adhering to Western beauty industry standards.
This one's not like any of a number of other beauty contest films, in which an essentially spectacular girl has her light hidden under a bushel of bad clothes and glasses, to be revealed in time to win in the final reel. And that's because this film is fundamentally a wish-fulfilment fantasy for - pardon me - fat, ugly, spoilt girls who don't look like Sandra Bullock at her messiest. Its message is that external attractiveness doesn't count as much as 'inner beauty'. Of course, the convenient thing about the inner variety is that there's no agreed standard, so just about anyone can claim it and be believable.
Our Becca has loads, of course, as she reveals constantly. The result is inevitable: hip, hip, hooray, the cute blonde is defeated (worse, she's converted), to the vicarious - not very beautiful - schadenfreude of the Becca-alikes in the audience.
The depressing thing about all this is that of course inner beauty exists, and of course it really is ultimately more profound than the external kind. But to specifically pit inner beauty against good looks *in a good-looks contest* is silly, pointless, and smacks of vicarious spoilt greed. A rather ugly film.
CD