Dumplin' (2018)

Dumplin' arrives from Netflix with a Dolly Parton soundtrack, a Texas small town, and a thesis it intends to defend at length. Willowdean Dickson, a plus-size teenager played by Danielle Macdonald, enters her mother's beloved Miss Teen Bluebonnet Pageant as an act of protest in heels. Her mother Rosie, a former beauty queen rendered with tight smiles by Jennifer Aniston, has spent years measuring her daughter against a standard the daughter never agreed to. The film knows exactly what it is doing. It is a self-acceptance parable, and it will not be subtle about the lesson.

The pageant becomes a laboratory for interrogating beauty standards, and the film treats that interrogation as its central drama. Willowdean's cohort includes Millie, another plus-size contestant who refuses to apologize for entering, and Hannah, an edgy feminist classmate named as such by the screenplay. Aunt Lucy's old world surfaces through a Dolly Parton drag revue, where Lee Wayne and his friends offer the film's warmest, most generous scenes. The queerness here is ambient, folded into the ensemble without becoming anyone's story. The casting places bodies and performers rarely centered in this genre, and the film lets them occupy the frame without ceremony.

Where the film preaches, it preaches through song and character, which softens the sermon but does not disguise it. The speeches about loyalty and the drag-bar catharsis carry an earnestness that borders on the instructional. Race goes unmentioned, the pageant-industrial complex earns only a glancing side-eye, and no one in this Texas town appears to have heard of a changing climate. This is a heartfelt, well-sung argument for loving the body you have. The argument is familiar. The delivery is sincere. We have seen the sermon before, and we will see it again.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}