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Ugly ducklings?

Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz in In Her Shoes
  • Posted at 1:47pm
  • 25 April 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

It used to be so easy: a woman would take off her glasses and shake her hair out of its bun. Aghast, a male co-worker would exclaim, "Why, Miss Jones, you're . . . beautiful!" But perceptions and images of women have come on a long way since those prehistoric days. Having your hair tied back and being short-sighted is no longer acceptable visual shorthand for "ugly".

Or is it? In Her Shoes is a comedy drama in which chalk-and-cheese sisters find common ground, and I seem to recall it has something to do with a pair of shoes. Now, as a bloke, I suspect I’m not the target audience, but I found it a bit rich that Toni Collette was the "ugly duckling" of the pair.

Cameron Diaz, you see, is blonde, thin and free (in both senses: unemployed and sexually liberated), while Collette's more sensible lawyer is brunette and, to quote the review in Variety, "somewhat overweight". Presumably they mean "overweight" in the same way that Anne Hathaway was in The Devil Wears Prada, in which we witness the blossoming of a plain Jane at a fashion magazine.

Now, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Hathaway is never going to challenge Quasimodo in an ugly contest, even wearing – gasp! – a baggy jumper, as she does early in the film.

Back in the 1940s, Bette Davis underwent the ultimate makeover in Now, Voyager. Her frumpy spinster enters a sanitorium on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and, thanks to Claude Rains's psychiatrist, walks out a socially confident glamour puss.

In 1964's My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn's cockney flower girl is moulded into an upper-class toff – by a man, of course. The Pygmalion format has weathered well – in the 1999 romantic comedy She's All That, geeky Rachael Leigh Cook (she wears glasses and has the surname Boggs) is turned into a prom queen. Needless to say, she was more attractive in the first place.

The beautification of a supposed frump may be nothing new, but in our age of body fascism, the competing needs of casting directors and marketing departments seem to be the problem. The story demands that Collette be less glam than Diaz. So, yet again, beauty becomes a matter of a bit of make-up and a pair of uncomfortable shoes.

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