Carnelle Scott (Holly Hunter) works at a Mississippi fish plant. Her cousin Elain Rutledge (Mary Steenburgen) is a celebrated former beauty queen who is scheduled to make a speech at the local Miss Firecracker beauty pageant. Despite being too old and too short, Carnelle enters the contest. She gets fired from her job. She gets her friend Popeye Jackson (Alfre Woodard) to make the costume. Elain plans to leave her family in Atlanta. Delmount Williams (Tim Robbins) is tired of his life and returns to confront his sister Elain for leaving him in an insane asylum. Delmount intends to sell the family home where Carnelle lives. Carnelle is desperate to wear Elain's red dress and win first prize.

I don't know anything about the play. It seems to me that it would be more compelling if Carnelle is younger and more homely. Despite the appealing cast, I find the performances flaky without being funny. The plot meanders around the quirky characters. Thomas Schlamme's directions are mostly indie. It's not until Delmount starts beating up Ronnie Wayne in the second half that it finds its comedic legs. It needs to be sharper as a comedy satire of small town pageants.

Based on the play of the same name, Miss Firecracker stars Holly Hunter repeating her off-Broadway stage role, along with Mary Steenburgen, Tim Robbins, Alfre Woodward, Scott Glenn, and Ann Wedgeworth.

This film is about a small Southern town and its beauty pageant, which takes place on the 4th of July.

It's not a coincidence that the playwright, Beth Henley, has the pageant held on Independence Day, because that's what the film is really about. Independence from the opinions of others, independence from the ties of what someone has set as a standard of beauty, the independence to explore and find yourself.

Carnelle Scott is a young local woman, and she believes that if she can be Miss Firecracker, she will receive the validation she has always craved, and then leave the town and go onto success elsewhere. She has no friends in town, and her reputation is not the best. She has a boyfriend who adores her (Glenn) but it isn't enough.

One inspiration for her is her cousin, Elain, and there, Carnelle doesn't see the forest for the trees. Elain is a past Miss Firecracker. She's not only totally self-involved, but her life is built around her past victories. To Carnelle, Elain's life is perfect.

Elain's brother is the volatile Delmount (Robbins) who wants to sell the house Carnelle lives in. He'll split the money with her. He was released from a mental institution; Elain and her husband refused to take him in.

Since this is the last year Carnelle is eligible, she decides to go for the pageant in a big way. And one thing she wants is to wear the bright red evening gown that Elain wore when she won; she has even dyed her hair bright red to match it.

Carnelle's major support comes from Popeye Jackson (Woodward),a young woman who wears Coke bottle glasses and works in a dress shop. Popeye helps Carnelle be outfitted for the pageant, and develops a crush on Delmount.

Though the character of Carnelle is the focus of the film, the one to be emulated is Popeye - kind, helpful, and uncaring about people's appearance. She's more interested in what's inside. And hopefully along the way this is what Carnelle learns as well.

Very sweet film and Hunter is dynamite as Carnelle. The movie is bigger than the play, which may not have been the best option for it. The direction by Thomas Schlamme, who has found great success in television, is only so-so. It should be a tighter production.

Don't miss Carnelle's part in the talent competition.

"Physiognomy": the act of judging people by their physical appearance.

As in her first film, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Crimes of the Heart, Beth Henley has created a collection of off-beat Southern Gothic characters. These characters seem familiar like old friends (or more like black-sheep cousins),ut the film goes beyond its representation of these endearing characters to explore deeper themes, to ask whether appearances are really important.

The Miss Firecracker Contest, is superficially, a comedy about a small town Southern beauty pageant, in which Henley reflects in a sardonic manner on how and why women put themselves through such contests. The pageant, however, merely frames the action. The play is ultimately about appearances. Henley introduces the idea that women shape their identities and bodies in terms of the opinions of other people, and the more important issue of breaking away from stereotypes in order to discover your personality. The beauty pageant is even held on the Fourth of July -- Independence Day.

All of the women in this play, except Popeye, define themselves in relation to the contest. Staying with Henley's successful formula of an insecure heroine who searches for acceptance from society and her family, The Miss Firecracker Contest is dominated by the beauty queen "wannabe," Carnelle Scott (a role created on stage by then little-known Southern actress Holly Hunter). Carnelle is not merely competing for the crown; she wants to win the contest so that she can win acceptance from the town of Brookhaven, Mississippi, shed her tawdry reputation, and leave the town in a "crimson blaze of glory." Carnelle's own name even expresses her sexual nature -- the derivation of her name, "carnal," means pleasures of a sexual nature.

Her cousin and idol, Elain, is a self-absorbed former pageant winner -- a Scarlett O'Hara for the twentieth century -- still living off the glory of her youth. Even Tessy Mahoney, one of the two ugliest girls in town, takes pleasure in the authority of the whistle and clipboard she wields as pageant coordinator. Of the women, only Popeye -- with her coke-bottle glasses -- is more concerned with "seeing" than with being seen. An admirer of beauty that transcends physical appearance, she serves as a mirror through which others may see their own self-worth.

The Miss Firecracker Contest continues Beth Henley's examination of the South -- and especially of small-town Southern women. In pursuing this theme, she is following in the steps of earlier Southern playwrights, such as Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams. And like Southern author William Faulkner with his fictitious county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, Henley appears to be establishing a physical universe and a cast of familiar characters for her canon of plays.