DUMPLIN’ – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

So this is the dramedy about a fat girl in small-town Texas who, fed up with her former-beauty-queen mother, decides to enter the local pageant that her mother runs. Just to piss her off. And to throw a spanner in the works of the feminine-beauty-industrial complex. And to protest our society’s shallow focus on women’s physical appearances and the narrow range of acceptability therein. (The girl has ambition.) Dumplin’ — this is the former-beauty-queen mom’s rather horrible nickname for her fat daughter — is a movie about how girls and women come in all different shapes and sizes, not just out of a Barbie-doll mold, and with all different personalities and interests, far from just one wannabe-supermodel package. And about how — obviously, and yet you’d hardly know it from our popular discourse — that is absolutely fine, and that all these various girls and women are still real girls and women.

Dumplin’ is far from a perfect movie, but it’s a lovely one anyway — hey, kinda like its heroine! — one that warmly embraces a wide(ish) range of girls-and-women-as-people, one that doesn’t reduce its large heroine to nothing more than her size: she’s simply a cool, funny, confused, perplexed, messed-up human being who still has a lot of growing up to do (which is okay; she’s still in high school). But perhaps the most amazing thing about Dumplin’ in this regard is that there is more than one fat girl in this movie. Continue reading…