The Ugly Truth About Beauty

America’s Top Model. Nip/Tuck. Extreme Makeover. How to Look Good Naked.

Switch on a TV anywhere in the western world and you’re confronted with images of beautiful people. Toned butts. Firm abs and teeth so sparkly you can see them from space.

All those lovely people - plus adverts for diet pills, exercise equipment and facial creams being crammed into our inboxes and mailboxes each and every day – make it easy to assume that The Way You Look is wrong and The Way They Look is what you should aspire to. After all, isn’t the message behind movies like The Devil Wears Prada that LOOKS are far more important than WHO you are?

In that movie, brainy Andy Sachs heads to Manhattan to begin a job at fashion magazine Runway. But before her boss Miranda takes brilliant Andy seriously, the brainy brunette has to shed the pounds and squeeze her size six butt into a skinny pair of Dolce and Gabbanas.

I mean, is it just me, or is the premise of a movie in which ridiculously gorgeous Anne Hathaway is considered fat just plain wrong?

But that’s the way the world is at the moment. Beauty is all important and if brainless-but-beautiful models like Miss Teen USA 2007 candidate Caitlin Upton have taught us anything, it’s that pretty people can achieve things regardless of their intellectual limitations.

But the result of this obsession with looks?

Scores of beautiful young men and women now think that they can succeed on looks alone.

That belief is flawed for many reasons – the main one being that beauty isn’t exactly uncommon.

If you’re willing to skip school to spend hours in the gym, or spend your savings on a boob job and teeth whitening, you too can become one of the ‘beautiful’ people.

Youth, exercise and diet are generally the foundation of good looks and the rest is just icing on the cake. But even after you’ve become ‘beautiful,’ the opportunities out there are limited.

There can only be one ‘America’s Top Model.’ James Bond only auditions for the next ‘Bond girl’ every three years or so. Sometimes, beautiful people have to take the opportunities on offer, whatever they are.

And that’s where you’ll find the real tragedy in being beautiful.

One infamous radio ‘Shock Jock,’ has beautiful young actresses on his show all the time (which seems pointless. Surely all cats are grey over the airwaves.) There’s a huge line of beautiful models and aspiring actresses clamoring for the chance to get into his studio and maybe hit the big time. But what is the price of this opportunity?

An example: A few months ago, he had beautiful young women on their hands and knees, attempting to catch meatballs (dripping in pasta sauce) between their buttocks. The audience whooped and hollered and the girls played along in good spirits – but what was going through their mind?

It must have been depressing. Their media ‘breakthrough’ involved kneeling like a dog with cold spaghetti sauce dripping down their thighs – and if they’d turned their nose up at this opportunity, there would have been a hundred other girls willing to do it in their place.

It seems in this looks obsessed society we live in, the only thing we love more than beautiful people is degrading them. It seems there’s no shortage of television programs, made for TV movies or raunchy frat-boy magazines willing to lead beautiful people through the meat grinder with the fleeting promise of fame. And worst of all? There’s no shortage of beautiful people willing to follow them.

If reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister has taught me anything, it’s that beautiful people risk their beauty becoming their defining feature.

So what’s the secret of the truly successful ‘beautiful’ people?

Being beautiful has never been their primary characteristic. It might have opened doors for them, but it’s never been the secret of their success.

Whether it was talent as an actress (like the wonderful Meryl Streep) or skills as a firebrand (like vile political pundit Anne Coulter) the ‘beautiful’ people who’ve made their mark had something going for them other than just their looks. That’s just the icing on the cake.

So if you’re a ‘beautiful person’ and you want to make it as a model, actress or just a diva like Paris Hilton, take one piece of advice from me (a fully qualified non-beautiful person.)

Have something that sets you apart from the rest. Skills. Talents. Opinions. Or a very rich daddy.

Be your own person. Set your own standards. Never let your (beautiful) reflection in the mirror reflect everything about who you are.

Becoming Jane

There's been a recent movement in the movie industry which insists on putting American actresses in roles traditionally more suitable for Brits.

It's been quite succesful. Rene Zellwegger was hilarious as portly publicist Bridget Jones and wonderful when she played Beatrix Potter. Gwyneth Paltrow impressed us all as Lady Viola in Shakespeare in Love and was excellent opposite John Hannah in London-set Sliding Doors.

Becoming Jane, the new biography of Jane Austen, rather daringly follows this movement by casting the stunning Anne Hathaway as Britain's most enduring female author.

Does it work?

Almost, but not quite. Which is pretty much how I felt about the entire movie.

Becoming Jane is a highly fictionalised account of Jane Austen's early years, as her financially strapped parents struggle to find her a suitable husband. Headstrong Jane rails against the notion of marrying for anything but love - and defies society by promising to 'live by her pen.'

Now I know what you're thinking. This does sound an awful lot like the plot of Miss Potter. Except without the animated rabbits. But read on...

While living in Hampshire with her parents (although the movie was filmed in Ireland, hence why the countryside looks nothing like the rolling hills around Winchester) Jane encounters Thomas Lefroy, a reckless, arrogant Irish lawyer. In a plot that mirrors Jane's magnum opus, Pride and Prejudice, Lefroy and Jane overcome their initial reservations and fall madly in love.

Their parents fail to approve, but Jane and Tom pledge to marry whatever the obstacles...

Oh, wait, this sounds remarkably like the plot of Miss Potter as well. But I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Anyway. Complications arise, fiction reluctantly follows fact and Jane dies a spinster, her books only just becoming popular.

I managed to sum up the plot in two short paragraphs. However writer Kevin Hood managed to spin this yarn out across two interminable hours. Where the Tom/Jane love match looked like faltering, some interesting subplots were teased along and my biggest complaint about this film is that they wound up being far more interesting than Jane's life story itself.

It's such a pity too. Almost every other facet of this film is promising. Anne Hathaway's performance is almost excellent, her British accent perfect and her screen presence undeniable. However Kevin Hood gave her such a negligible role it was impossible for her to get her teeth into it.

The rest of the all star cast, including James Cromwell and Julie Walters, fared much better, really rising to the occasion and lighting up the screen as they were given the best lines and most dramatic scenes. But like a Sunday roast, cramming the plate with trimmings is unsatisfactory if there's no real meat to enjoy.

The film looks beautiful as well, although cinematographer Eigil Bryld indulges in some cheap MTV camera tricks on at least two occasions, which really jar with the peace and pacing of the rest of the film. The score is flat and predictable, seemingly lifted note-for-note from one of the recent Austen adaptations, but in a regency drama like this, I'm not sure what else they could have used which wouldn't have seemed out of place.

Once all the pieces have been assembled, the entire movie looks and sounds good. It's only the horrible writing that really makes it fall down flat. I found myself looking at my watch several times, waiting to see when the story was going to wrap up to it's predictable conclusion. That in itself was a cinematic crime that can't be ignored.

I'd recommend this film only if you're an avid Austen fan - although prepare to be disappointed. Despite what little actual plot Kevin Hood scribbled down, most of it is highly fictionalised.