A sublime and exceptional giant rubber band of a satire that contains strands that should collide with one another, since Michael Ritchie and the writer Jerry Belson have sympathy and I think even want people watching the film to see themselves possibly in some (or all) of these young women who have been put into an incredible and ego-boosting yet at the same time ultimately demoralizing circumstance that is a pageant for showing what they can do (which has less import than if they're pretty or have good skin or, ultimately, that they're milk-fed fresh white girls), but they also don't want us to forget that so much of what's around them is full of crap, and that there are people who see it for what it is.
A good example of the he semi-famed musical director (Michael Kidd, unstoppable funny) most of all, hired to train these young ladies to do a dance number to which at one point is quips in a perfect deadpan that they're "less Ginger Rogers and more Roy Rogers" and how be clashes with one of the major pageant sponsors or producers or whomever, like when they demand a change to the stage ramp, the gloves figuratively come off. And I liked very much how the filmmakers chose a few key women to focus on here - Melanie Griffith in an early role doesn't get much to do, but why carp when Annette O'Toole and Joan Prather who have to try and navigate for themselves what's there to do and not do in advancing ahead in the pageant (one scene between them in the hotel room says it all, with, as with so many scenes in the movie, a howler of a line to end the scene with) - and that people tend to float in and out from scenes and make impressions, like the school custodians who also see through the BS from time to time. But they don't lose sight of the lead here, which is Bruce Dern's Big Bob.
Of course, one can safely assume that if a man is named Big Bob and sells vehicles in a mid-sized town in the 70s then that man is probably an asshole, and perhaps on paper Big Bob came off more that way. But Dern makes him engaging and compelling just by how he stretches out certain words or uses emphasis at times like with the scenes between Bob and his bedraggled and mess of a good friend played by Nicholas Pryor (another stand out). You get as soon as Dern starts talking why a) he would be Big Bob and his horn dog of a teenage progeny would be Little Bob, and b) why he is in a lot of ways like the film itself around him. This is a character who we know is written as a comment on the national character in a sense, that here's a guy who sells for a living and has to put on a big smile (hey the title again, as the young women do), and he has a sense of who he wants to be. And when he becomes the main judge of the pageant - we know he is because he has the gold name tag - he takes it totally seriously, despite the distractions of his own making (*that* scene which all I will say involves a creepy halfassed chicken outfit is so uncanny it nearly derails the film till it whiplashes back in a stunning way).
At the same time that he is these things he is a real person, a veteran even as we find out at the very end, and when he gets called out for having a shallow sense of how to live and be by his good friend when this guy is at his lowest point the shock or even hurt in Bob's face is direct and true. How could he be... like a pageant girl?! But that's the thing about a beauty pageant, isn't it? There's so much that goes into creating a persona and yet there's this knowing sense that it's an act (not to say that Big Bob is a poor salesman, on the contrary as we see), and yet what is there when all is said and done when something major is achieved? I could write a whole dissertation I think about Bob and what these days reveal about him, about these ladies, and that surfaces are paramount to how a pageant queen thrived and dominates, not what's actually inside a person - and yet at the same time how important that the person believes their own bs (hence why the Mexican contestant rings false to everyone around her, ultimately she's a token and relies solely on that without it seeming genuine).
For all that this could be drawn in broad strokes, like if someone in the Kubrick vein (or the madman himself) had made this, what's so great about Smile is the accumulation of small moments and lines, sometimes ones that another filmmaker would think are throwaways, and Ritchie mines these little nuggets for all they're worth and indeed many of the funniest parts come from these exchanges - take as one example when Dern and Pryor are ordering takeout (from a dog-themed hot dog joint, of course) and a man inside hears the real talk between them and chimes in with his own thoughts on their existential musings - and it's all about behavior and timing.
I'm not even sure everything here is necessary, like the whole minor subplot with the teen boys going through rigamarole to get a camera so Little Bob can snap a picture of some (even partial) nudity, but then again what else would young aimless teen men do in a small town knowing dozens of women specifically there to be shown off? It all adds up to this overwhelming sense that when people prime themselves to want to enjoy the spectacle of this kind of show, and that the people putting it on understand what their roles are. Again what's so good is how Ritchie rides that line tonally so that he makes fun of the situations, not so much the people, and even when they deserve it there's this cringe that's deeply felt - weren't we all there once in school or some other place, playing a part to advance in society?
And by the end, Dern's Big Bob sees that the result of who won is not that... well, inspiring or leaving him with any good feeling. It's more like, well, that happened and now we are wrapping up this pap and moving on. It's the kind of ending that must have inspired the sort of writing one saw on masterful early Simpsons. Moreover, Smile seems to me like if (and why if I'm like 99% sure) Alexander Payne saw this he owes like half his career to this kind of honest, humanist but savage satire on the American dream.
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