For smarter audiences… AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

On a scale of 1 to 10, Americans rate a… Oh, hold on. That’s the whole problem. As a nation, we are obsessed with ranking our attractiveness, comparing ourselves with friends, loved ones and supermodels. It’s a simple, overwhelming problem but never has it been addressed with such clarity, breadth, depth and earnestness as it has by Darryl Roberts in his documentary, AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. The filmmaker covers more social blemishes than Clearasil on a high school chess team. Wisely, he frames the cornucopia of related (and some very tangential) aesthetic concerns with the story of Gerren Taylor, a 12-year-old girl who broke into the modeling industry, quite literally, accidentally. The young beauty’s trajectory is acute, spiraling downward rapidly after a moonshot launch. Her rags to runway to rags saga, parallels our own insatiable craving for beauty and our inevitable failure to achieve this unattainable ideal, resulting in a snowballing self-loathing. (You can never be too rich, too thin… or too well-therapized.) Mister Roberts could be faulted for intermittent navel-gazing, but that is an inherent and forgivable pitfall of the filmmaker-fronted documentary form. Luckily, one grows fond’a his demeanor, thanks in large part to his narrative naivety and the sage, compartmentalized editing of Kurt Engfehr (who partially-tamed Michael Moore in FAHRENHEIT 9/11). AMERICA’s highlights include the shocking candor of magazine editors admitting to their rampant exploitation (their honesty may explain why many no longer hold their jobs) and the appalling bruit force of Dr. Steven Marquardt, a certified (and certifiable) Maxillofacial surgeon, who spouts more clichéd racist claptrap than Archie Bunker, Jesse Helms and Don Imus on a moonshine-fueled Klan retreat. (I needed an operation just to wire my dropped jaw back in place.) AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL ought be seen from sea to shining sea, but an R-rating may limit the audience that is most in need of viewing it. (Apparently, the MPAA deems a couple of curse words and some suggestive banter morally unacceptable, while THE LOVE GURU with its barrage of inane innuendo earned a PG-13. Write your local censor if you are outraged.) AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL will prove redundant to the self-actualized and thoroughly enlightening to the young, the insecure and the media-saturated.

Check out The Warren Report podcast for Warren’s interview with filmmaker Darryl Roberts recorded over three separate nights in Seattle during preview screenings of AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL.