Writer and Director Darryl Roberts opens his documentary on the American fascination with beauty, and how it is defined, by admitting that he had been dating a wonderful woman, but had never asked her to marry him because he always felt he could find a woman who was just as wonderful, but more beautiful.  With his former love now happily married to another man, he looks back and wonders what made him weigh about the superficial aspect of the relationship so heavily.  Who decides what is beautiful, and who is making money off of that definition?

With this lofty question, he sets out to learn the answers, and the result is the film America the Beautiful.  Roberts spends a good deal of time introducing us to Gerren Taylor, a 12-year-old runway model who for a time was all the rage in Los Angeles fashion circles.  Watching her strut in clothes designed for women twice her age, with the swagger of a sexually-active adult, gives the audience some of the same uncomfortable chills that portions of Little Miss Sunshine might have.  With the typical controlling, aggressive, live-through-her-daughter mother, Gerren is a child thrust into an adult’s world, and we all know it can’t end in a positive way.  Someday, either during or after the film, she is going to be set up for a fall from grace.

Roberts touches on a number of other topics throughout the documentary: our obsession with unhealthy, thin models; the cosmetics industry, and how some of the products may contain toxic materials; bulimia and anorexia, and how advertising and society can be a contributing factor; plastic surgery, to the extremes of surgery for pets, and the “designer vagina” fad; a web site devoted to “beautiful people” who need to be voted in to become members; and much more.

If the film has a flaw, it is that it tries to cover too much ground and discuss too many topics.  An interview with an “expert” who has a theory on why society prefers lighter skin could have been eliminated completely; it serves no purpose other than to paint the expert as a nut, but his theory is never really explained.  And some topics could be an entire film in themselves, such as the culture on Fiji and how drastically it changed – including its views on beauty – when television was introduced.  But America the Beautiful does provoke thought and discussion.  So, in that regard, the film is successful.  And I think the overall point of the topic can be summed up by a woman who works with a national eating disorders group, where she said (and I am quoting from memory “If people build a time machine and come back to look at this society, they’re going to see a 90 pound girl over here, spending $30,000 a month in a hospital getting treatment for an eating disorder, and they’ll see another 90 pound girl getting paid $30,000 a month as a model, and they’re going to be unable to figure out what the differences in the girls are.”