Movie Reviews : ‘Miss Firecracker’: Beauty in Bursts of Affection

Mississippi playwright Beth Henley specializes in dippy, small-town Southern Gothic; black humor with polka dots. In her 1981 Pulitzer-Prize winner “Crimes of the Heart,” she gave us three oddball small-town Southern sisters united in catastrophe. The new Henley play-into-film, “Miss Firecracker” (AMC Century 14), has three more relatives coming together for another disaster: Yazoo City’s annual Fourth of July beauty contest.

It’s a low-budget production with major-league acting by Mary Steenburgen, Holly Hunter and Alfre Woodard. It’s not directed sharply enough; Thomas Schlamme is particularly weak on the fight scenes. The humor is as arch as arch can be: One character sews little uniforms for pet bullfrogs.

But Henley’s special style and viewpoint come through: a bittersweet comic world of defiant oddballs, highfalutin phonies and passionate, half-crazy dreamers.

The tacky little beauty competition has awesome significance for two characters: ugly-duckling Carnelle Scott (Hunter), who idolizes her beautiful cousin, Elain, and cherishes the dream of winning her old title, and Elain Rutledge herself (Steenburgen), who, beneath a mask of honey-chile seduction and gracious wiles, would probably rather faint than see her title demeaned by scruffy little Carnelle.

Carnelle has two friends to sustain her foolish fancies: her alcoholic carny boyfriend, Mac Sam (Scott Glenn), and her wide-eyed, radiantly enthusiastic seamstress Popeye, (Alfre Woodard). But she’s caught between her cousins: Elain and crazy poet Delmount, whom Tim Robbins turns into the image of an NBA-size Michael J. Pollard after an all-night drunk. Carnelle is besotted on Elain’s fancy lies, torn up by Delmount’s rude outbursts. All she wants is one thing: to be a beauty. But can she?

When her dialogue is working right, Henley gets the audience laughing and snorting by turns. What usually saves her is the innate theatricality of her main subject, Southern women, and of her approach. She is an ex-actress who knows the kind of emotions and lines actors like to play and she filters her characters through all the Southern or Midwestern Gothic plays she remembers from the ‘50s on: Williams, Faulkner, Inge, McCullers. Her plays are actors’ showcases; that’s why they attract such good actors.

There are a lot of good ones here: Holly Hunter, who originated the part of determined little Carnelle; Robbins; Glenn; Ann Wedgeworth, and the late Trey Wilson. Most of all, there’s Woodard, who makes Popeye a giddily wonderful goofball romantic, and Steenburgen, who is absolutely deadly as Elain. Steenburgen plays all of her lines with two levels: the preening syrupy top; the curdled, resentful vinegary underpinning. And she keeps them in a dizzy comic balance. She shows us what makes this pretty, silky little witch tick.

Henley likes to play with the simmering, pathological underside of small-town Southern life, the hatreds, the jealousies, the obsessions, madness, even murders, but she usually leaves it all spinning clownishly from one joke to the next. There’s a whiff of condescension in her portrayals; after all, she’s a city girl from Jackson.

But the high point in “Miss Firecracker” is probably Carnelle’s crack-brained patriotic tap-dancing routine at the contest, and there the condescension works comically. Hunter catches the scattered, fierce concentration and crazy glee of the inept performer. There is ridicule there, but there is also affection. And in our last flashback image of Carnelle as a little girl, beaming, full of love, infatuated with the wonderful, sweet cousin who throws her a rose, there is compassion as well.