Darryl
Roberts' big-hearted, fuzzy-headed message movie America The Beautiful offers a thorough illustration of
the limitations of good intentions. Looking and sounding like Cee-Lo Green's
lumbering, effete uncle, Roberts blunders amiably and cluelessly through his
amateurish eyesore of a documentary on society's obsession with beauty,
perpetually searching for a thesis that will transform a shambling mess of
half-baked thoughts and pointless digressions into a real documentary. Roberts
has the benefit of a rich, under-explored topic—society's impossible
beauty standards and their ruinous effects on the psyches of young
women—but his conclusions come off as both vague and self-evident. With
help from head researcher Captain Obvious, Roberts discovers that advertising
exploits sex and promotes unrealistic body images, that there are entire
industries built on making women feel bad about how they look, and that
modeling is a cruel and Darwinian business, especially for a 13-year-old.
Perhaps in future exposes Roberts will uncover that ice is cold and furnaces
hot.
The latest
in a long line of would-be Michael Moores, Roberts uses a recent break-up as a
launching board to explore why women are held to such impossible beauty
standards. The documentary's most intriguing scenes follow the meteoric rise of
Gerren Taylor, a striking, exuberant model whose career kicked into high gear
while she was still in middle school. Taylor is a riveting subject:
charismatic, magnetic, and emotionally transparent, but instead of focusing on
her, the director wastes time with unedifying detours, like a networking site
for beautiful people that rejects Roberts as a member and an exploration of
unsafe ingredients in make-up. For every interview subject like Eve Ensler, who
has something of value to contribute, there are four or five interviewees
seemingly chosen at random, like this one guy who discourses on how women are
just naturally dumb and shit.
It's hard
to say which is more depressing or telling: that Roberts is so hard up for
material that he includes bizarre footage of a possibly stoned Anthony Kiedis
complimenting him for having a beautiful handshake or that Kiedis' perplexing
praise comes back to play a major role in Roberts' film-capping summation of
all he's learned. Though to be fair, Roberts' righteous handshake does appear
eminently worthy of praise. It's too bad the same can't be said of his
hopelessly muddled film.