Documentary films are held to a different standard than the latest summer box office fluff or even the “serious” films of November and December.  Because they are journalistic in nature, docs are allowed to be quirky and relentless and violate taboos that would never wash in a typical Big Hollywood film.  For example, take any romantic comedy.  Are the main characters ever homely?  Even remotely?  We’re not talking about the quirky sidekicks; they’re allowed to be goofy-looking and have zero fashion sense.  But the leads, especially in a film like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are uniformly gorgeous.  When you look at films and TV series that all feature great-looking young guys and gals, you start to wonder if beautiful actors and actresses are a finite resource that we’re about to run out of.

But we digress.  The point is, Hollywood rarely does ugly, and it certainly doesn’t do deformity.  That’s why it was so wonderful to see the film “”Smile Pinki” win the Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject.  The 40-minute film, which follows a poor girl in India who receives free surgery to correct her cleft lip, brings the viewer a microcosm of a larger world in which thousands of children from impoverished areas receive free surgery each year to correct cleft lips and cleft palates—birth defects which, in their own cultures, can mark them as pariahs and open them to discrimination and misery.   The film is so deeply touching because Pinki, the young girl whom the film follows, is so beautiful even before she receives her new face from plastic surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh.  Her smile is radiant throuhout the film, before and after.

But “Smile Pinki”’s victory highlights something more subtle than the hopeful trend that Hollywood will reward inner beauty as well as outer beauty.  The film and the efforts to help the more than 4 million children around the world born with cleft lips and cleft palates reveal to us that beauty matters.  These children, by and large, are otherwise healthy.  Why make such a fuss over a face that doesn’t conform to our innate beauty standards?  Doesn’t character matter more than anything else?

No, though it should.  We haven’t come that far yet and perhaps we never will.  We are still swayed by beauty and repelled by those who don’t fit the ideal, and this is especially true in the Indian provinces we see in the film, where children born with a defect are often shunned.  Beauty does matter.  It still suggests virtue and worthiness to us, and while we would never suggest that children born with a visible cosmetic problem should just live with it, the question should be, “Why is it so hard for them to do just that?”  That’s not just a question for the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, but for the U.S. as well.  We don’t exactly reach out to our disabled—the people who remind us that we’re all just a genetic dirty trick away from a missing limb or a cleft lip.  We don’t make movies about them, and we should.  We should celebrate their beauty, which is just as great as Kate Winslet’s or Hugh Jackman’s.  Maybe one day, someone else will make a movie like “Smile Pinki” that wins Best Picture.  Until then…

Stay beautiful,

Debi & Eva