Sally Field's directorial debut, entitled "Beautiful," is anything but. It's an amateurishly written, miscasted, wrong-headed
slab of drudgery that punishes all who choose to watch it. We begin in 1986 in Naperville, Ill. Twelve-year-old Mona Hibbard (Colleen Rennison) wants nothing more than to be a beauty queen, despite being blessed with a face that is more charismatic than beautiful. She enters one local pageant after another, with no support from her drunk, trailer-trash mother (Linda Hart) or her creepy stepfather (Brent Briscoe). All she has is her equally unpopular friend Ruby (Jacqueline Steiger), who helps her sew dresses for the contests and lends moral support. Skip ahead several years. Mona (now played by Minnie Driver) is apparently promiscuous -- the film hints vaguely at this during one 30-second scene -- and gets pregnant. Knowing that pageant rules would disqualify her from being Miss Illinois, much less Miss America (or "Miss American Miss," as the movie calls it, apparently due to legal reasons), she convinces Ruby (now Joey Lauren Adams) to raise the child as her own.
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