Miss Congeniality by Grace + 3 Comments

Really, when you know the premise of Miss Congeniality (FBI agent infiltrates a beauty contest) and see the previews, it doesn't exactly fill your head with visions of heroine content. Or of good filmmaking. Which is why, when the film was made in 2000, it took me until this past week to see it.

The filmmaking itself is just as bad as I expected. It's a romantic comedy, not a particularly good one. Whatever you picture when you read that is probably about what you're going to get. The heroine content, however, is better than I had expected. It's not off the charts, but it is respectable.

Sandra Bullock plays Gracie Hart, a one-of-the-guys FBI agent who is assigned to an undercover operation trying to catch a serial killer at a national beauty pageant (something like Miss America). It's a basic "Taming of the Shrew" type story--she gets a makeover, suddenly everyone realizes she's gorgeous, she learns Important Things about her personality while pretending to be her opposite. There's nothing out of the ordinary there.

What is worth noting, however, is that an inept as Gracie sometimes is, she's also taken seriously as an FBI agent who can take care of herself. In an early scene, she and her supervisor/romantic possibility Eric (Benjamin Bratt) spar, and it's clear that they are evenly matched. It is she who "saves the day" at the end of the film, and like Ginger Rogers, she does everything her male counterparts do, but in heels (and, in her case, a bikini). As a female member of an otherwise male FBI team, she is certainly subjected to some sexism, and a lot of it is laughed off, but she proves herself to be good at her job not "in spite of" but as it turns out "because of" being a woman, and, in a very romantic comedy way, it seems to be ultimately empowering.

The other notable thing is the relationship Gracie develops with some of her fellow pageant contestants. The upshot is the inevitable "not all beauty queens are stupid and shallow" moral, but there's also a nice thread of Gracie learning to interact with women. After a fellow contestant tells her about being sexually assaulted, Gracie does a female self-defense demonstration for her "talent." Gotta love that.

The film doesn't do a terrible job with race, either. Male lead Benjamin Bratt is Latino (half Peruvian), and there are several other non-white supporting characters, including the FBI honcho Gracie and Eric work for and several of the pageant contestants. There is a scene in which rude and semi-racist things are said to the Hawaiian contestant, and they are not played as jokes at the expense of the Hawaiian beauty queen, but rather as ignorance on the part of the joker (another contestant).

This is in no way a great movie. In fact, it's not even a very good one. However, it is nowhere near as sexist or racist as I'd expect, and it has moments of honest-to-God feminism. For that, two stars.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close