'Beautiful' gets ugly
\"Beautiful" is the story of Mona Hibbard (Minnie Driver), a woman from Naperville, Ill., obsessed with winning the fictional Miss American Miss pageant despite the threat of being disqualified for having a child (Hallie Kate Eisenberg). "Beautiful" is also actress Sally Field's first time out as director, and it's more than a little depressing that the woman who uttered the now-famous phrase "You like me -- you really like me!" should, at age 54, still be mucking about with the tiresome women's themes of acceptance and self-esteem. That she goes about doing so with a script about beauty pageants makes her work here that much more dubious.