The staggeringly awful directorial debut of Sally Field, Beautiful stars Minnie Driver as a white-trash social climber whose obsession with winning a Miss America-like beauty pageant dominates every aspect of her life. A poorly educated, socially impaired borderline sociopath with no visible means of income, a hideous losing streak, and a scandal-racked history, Driver inexplicably ends up crowned Miss Illinois despite her repellent personality and mile-long record of cheating. Joey Lauren Adams co-stars as Driver's only friend and Beautiful's only halfway-likable character, a saintly nurse who pretends to be the mother of Driver's child (Pepsi spokesmoppet Hallie Kate Eisenberg) to keep her from being disqualified from the pageant. Beautiful opens with a far-fetched premise and adds increasing layers of implausibility, asking audiences to accept not just Driver's unlikely beauty queen but also Adams' wrongful imprisonment, Driver's attempts to hide Eisenberg's identity, and a scheming reporter out to discredit Driver on live television. It's possible that Todd Haynes could have done something disturbing and satirical with the creepy, vacuous emptiness of Driver's monomaniacal schemer, but Field just veers between isolated moments of ham-fisted, sub-Drop Dead Gorgeous comedy and insultingly manipulative, sub-soap-opera melodrama. Driver does what she can with one of the least sympathetic protagonists in film history, but she's stuck playing a nonsensical character who runs the gamut from loathsome to evil. Her cruel, unthinking treatment of the constantly squealing Eisenberg borders on child abuse, while Beautiful's barely hidden contempt for common sense constitutes audience abuse, pure and simple.