This is the role that we've been waiting for Ellen Page to get since making her mark in "Juno." Bliss Cavendar is neither as smart-ass nor as confident as Juno MacGuff, the sardonic high school girl who gets pregnant and chooses to carry it to term for adoptive parents. She's a lot more real, a restless girl in a suburb of a suburb, enduring one young miss beauty pageant after another at the urging of her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), who comes off like a stage mom obsessed with appearances—she is, after all, a former pageant queen herself—but is really more pragmatic. As a mail carrier with a blue-collar husband (Daniel Stern as the warmly supportive dad relegated to the margins of the film) and a solid but drab suburban home in the heart of football country, she sees pageants as lessons in poise and public speaking and a shot as scholarships. That doesn't make Bliss any more excited about the grind or the girlie makeovers.

On one of her brief escapes from Bodeen, Texas, during a shopping trip with... (more)