A high-school student known at home as Dumplin' puts her name down for the teen beauty pageant her mother has run for years. The entry is meant as an objection rather than an attempt to win, and it does not stay a private one for long. Anne Fletcher directed the 2018 American comedy-drama.
What is Dumplin' about?
Willowdean is the plus-size teenage daughter of Rosie, a former pageant winner who now organises the Miss Teen Bluebonnet competition in their town. She has grown up around the sashes and the rehearsal rooms without ever seeing anyone like herself on the stage. Filling out an entry form is aimed squarely at the contest's unwritten rules about who belongs there. Word travels, and other girls who had assumed the pageant was closed to them send in forms of their own. What follows covers the weeks of preparation, the friendships that strain under them, and the gap between a mother and a daughter who measure the same event by very different standards.
About the cast
The cast is led by Danielle Macdonald and Jennifer Aniston, with Luke Benward, Odeya Rush, Dove Cameron, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Maddie Baillio and Georgie Flores among the contestants, relatives and classmates around them. Much of the ensemble work happens in rehearsal halls and backstage corridors.
Context & significance
Dumplin' sits within a run of late-2010s American comedy-dramas built around teenagers who fall outside the template their surroundings expect. The two genre labels the catalogue carries describe the balance fairly: the pageant material supplies most of the humour, the mother-and-daughter thread the weight. The competition itself is treated as an institution with its own etiquette and hierarchy rather than as one long joke, which gives the later entries something solid to push against. At 110 minutes there is room for the preparation sequences to breathe and for the domestic scenes to land apart from the comic ones. Responses to it have ranged widely.
Watching Dumplin' on Ktime
Dumplin' streams on K-Time. This page is open to read without an account, and playback starts once you sign in. The interface runs in Farsi and English across web, mobile and television apps, so a household can browse in whichever language suits it, and a title started on one device carries on from the same point on the next.