Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Willowdean “Dumplin’” Dixon (Danielle Macdonald) doesn’t believe she fits in. Where her mother Rosie (Jennifer Aniston) is all tiara’s, tan’s and twirls, basking in her glory days as a one time winner of the Miss Teen Bluebonnet beauty pageant, Willowdean is more like her aunt Lucy.

Sadly after Lucy dies suddenly, all Willowdean has to remember her by, are packed up boxes of memories, and their shared love of Dolly Parton. Both will be the key to helping Willowdean mourn, and open herself up to the possibility of more.

I’ll tell you right now that I didn’t like this movie. My face was fixed in a perpetual state of disbelief, annoyance and boredom. It’s been a while since a movie really pissed me off but I’ll stop this from rolling into a rant and just outline the whys.

Fundamentally my issue with this movie was Willowdean’s attitude – nobody in the movie ever said a mean thing to her – the other pageant girls were on the nice side of indifferent, she liked a guy who seemed to like her back and she had a kind and supportive best friend.

The whole movie was pretty one sided, as she obliterated all her relationships, that even the safety net of Dolly Parton as a refuge and grief born of Aunt Lucy’s death weren’t enough to explain her over reactions or pad out her lack of character progression.

There were a lot of sketchy moments in the movie, mainly born from the fact that Willowdean was incredibly judgmental. She trashed the physicalities and interests of those around her when not a single single person called her out for her weirdly inherited Dolly Parton obsession. I mean come on.

From beginning to end Willowdean got under and over her own issues, but even though it was a personal journey, the frame work of the movie wasn’t built that way. She didn’t acknowledge that it was all her own insecurities that were making her act some kind of way and instead had a miraculous change of heart at the beginning of the last act. She was a terribly unlikable lead.

Maybe they culled all the helpful life lessons and words and wisdom from the book to for the Netflix adaptation? At least that’s what I’ll be telling myself to ignore the fact that the movie had no real morals or messages to give to its target audience.

If you haven’t noticed I’ve stayed away from watching a lot of the YA Netflix adaptations, mostly because I find the re-imagined characters unbearably annoying.

You’re probably wondering why I even watched this movie in the first place, let alone stuck with it through to the end. Well there’s a BookTuber I watch who mentioned the adaptation a few months ago, when she was invited on a set visit.

Sucks to be me because I thought she had a cameo role in the movie too (she didn’t) so I pretty much sat through Dumplin’ for nothing.