Netflix’s Dumplin’ Review: Have a Holly Dolly Christmas and a Gay Yuletide Cry

I sure was leery when Netflix announced it was adapting Julie Murphy’s beloved young adult novel, Dumplin‘, into an original film. A southern girl who has a complicated relationship with her mother and feels like she doesn’t fit in anywhere finds courage and decodes how to be a human through Dolly Parton’s music? There’s a lot of ways that one’s gonna hit close to home, at one of the hardest times of the year to be thinking about home, and anyway what it if it makes me cry? My beloved east Tennesseean Laneia pushed me to it when she reviewed it thus: “I can’t believe how much I don’t hate Jennifer Aniston’s accent in Dumplin‘!”  Well, friends, it did make me cry. Cry cry cry cry. But in oh such a cathartic and toasty-hearted way! But the Lord I CRIED.

Dumplin‘ goes like this: Texas teen Willowdean Dickson (Danielle Macdonald) is basically raised by her Aunt Lucy, a hardcore Dolly Parton fan, while her mom, Rosie (Jennifer Aniston), relives her high school glory days by coordinating and running the Miss Teen Bluebonnet Pageant year after year. Willowdean is shy and self-conscious about her size, especially compared to the constantly-dieting and never-not-exercising Bluebonnet girls her mom is always fawning over. But Lucy’s not thin either and she’s got all the confidence in the world to pass onto her niece, often though Dolly-isms. Lucy even introduces Willowdean to a kindred spirit named Ellen (Odeya Rush) when they’re only little girls and now they’ve been best friends for a decade. When Lucy dies unexpectedly, Willowdean and Rosie are left circling each other without much in common and another pageant looming. And so Willowdean revolts! She starts a revolution to take the Bluebonnets down from the inside, and is joined by BFF Ellen; Millie Michalchuk (Maddie Baillio), another fat girl from her school; and Hannah Perez (Bex Taylor-Klaus), a combat-booted coded-lesbian who auditions for the talent portion of the pageant by holding her fist in the air and shouting about destroying the patriarchy.

Is it formulaic? Yes, it’s formulaic. But it’s fresh, too! The heart of the thing is women with layered, complicated personalities and motivations who support each other and hardly talk about boys at all. The catalyst for growth isn’t a desire to change, but the fact that Willowdean and Hannah and Millie find themselves at one of Lucy’s old hangouts: a Dolly-themed biker drag bar. The drag queens make them over, hone their talents, nurture and uplift them and cheer them on. They don’t tell them to be different; they make them more of who they are. (Though it should be noted that we do have here a magical black drag queen who is both glorious and very trope-y.) And no one’s ever telling Millie or Willowdean to lose weight, or that their weight has something to do with their lovability, successfulness, or sexiness. Willowdean’s love interest, Bo Larson, is a teen dreamboat and the only thing he says about Willowdean’s size is “To hell with anyone else who’s made you feel less than beautiful.” Also, I’ve never seen Bex Taylor-Klaus have so much fun on-screen in my life. (Maybe because they weren’t playing a lesbian about to get axe-murdered and stuffed in a car trunk.)

And Dolly. Dolly. Dolly. Dolly. She is the soundtrack to this movie, with old songs and a new song and covers of her classics. She’s quoted, danced to, sung with, her posters are everywhere, Willowdean’s even got a t-shirt with Dolly’s face on it.

When I was a little kid I had a recurring dream around Christmastime that Mary and Joseph showed up at the inn in Bethlehem, which looked exactly like my great-grandparents’ barn but trimmed with circus-colored Christmas lights, and instead of being turned away to go birth Jesus in the cold, Dolly Parton would always burst through the barn doors and say, “Come on in! There’s room for everybody!” When I told my Sunday School teacher about it she said, “I think you missed the point of the birth of Christ” but by the time I was listening to Dolly Parton’s Live and Well album in 2002, hearing her change the lyrics of “Jolene” to “Your smile is like a breath of spring / Your voice is soft like summer rain / Well, I cannot compete with you drag queens” in front of an audience in Dollywood, I knew I was right on Christmas and Dolly Parton was right on just about everything.

Willowdean Dickson gets it. And so does Dumplin‘.

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1719 articles for us.

25 Comments

  1. I really enjoyed this and also I kind of want someone to edit together some sort of mash-up of this movie and Whip It for a glorious, pageant/derby coming of age for high school kids of all sizes?

  2. I want to watch it so bad, but Netflix Latin America hasn’t released it yet? I feel cheated and left out – upside down smiling emoji

  3. I’m always nervous to watch things “about” fatness, and I will probably always have anxiety/extreme discomfort watching said things, but despite all my personal hangups I still ended up really enjoying this movie, which is how I know it was really powerfully good. So fun, so gay, so Dolly.

    • This hit fewer of my cringing-while-watching-things-about-fatness trigger points than normal! Partly because I felt like the characters’ bodies were just their bodies, and were only an “issue” because of how the world is? I’m not describing it well, but it ended up less in the ‘We Are Fat But Fabulously Charismatic So It’s Fine’ vein of Hairspray and more just…we are human, and also great?

  4. I saw the movie over the weekend and really enjoyed the soundtrack. The movie itself was good, mostly due to Bex and the soundtrack imho.

  5. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I do want to say that in the book, Hannah is an on-the-page lesbian who talks about it openly and brings her girlfriend as her date to the pageant.

  6. I’m really really really hoping that the success of Dumplin’ pushes Netflix to make the sequel/follow-up Puddin’ because Maddie Baillio is a goddamn treasure and I need a Millie Michalchuk movie stat.

    • i just read puddin’ the other week and god i loved it so much?? like millie is a goddamn tresasure and maddie baillio did such a good job with the role. plus there’s that opportunity to see a ‘mean girl learns a lesson’ arc with callie which is nice to live vicariously through since my mean girls stayed mean

  7. I watched the trailer for this on Netflix, and was already intrigued, but you’ve just made it sound SOOOOOO much better. For starters, the trailer never mentions Bex Taylor-Klaus or drag queens. That’s enough to sell me on nearly anything.

  8. Dumplin’ is AMAZING but its soundtrack is OUT OF THIS WORLD. I just wanna listen to it on repeat for like ever and ever and ever but it’ll have to wait until mid-January…or so because I refuse to break my Christmas music from November ’til mid-January…or so tradition.

  9. i watched this movie while recovering from a cold and i think i sent approximately one gazillion texts to my only friend who’s read the book. like, i’m from texas? i’m fat? i love dolly parton? IS THIS A MOVIE FOR ME??

    also julie murphy (the author of the book!) is a gem of a person and her cameo made me grin

      • the final one when they’re in the bar having that lovely montage! she’s sitting at one of the tables in a dress that i thiiiiink has red peppers on it? maybe strawberries?

  10. I too started crying from the beginning.

    And then when halfway through when I realised that this was a movie about (among other things) grief booyyyythe waterworks just started and wouldn’t stop. I loved it SO MUCH.

    • YES!!! I really wanted them to end up together but Hannah’s gf was her escort in the movie too which was unfortunately glossed over. I still enjoyed the fignewtons out of Dumplin’ and had several fantastic hearty cries throughout the movie

    • I looked up this article again now that I’ve watched the movie specifically because I was wondering if anybody else was shipping that! I thought they were going to kiss when Millie came offstage from singing

  11. I loved this movie BUT I was confused that we didn’t get to see Hannah’s escort for the formal section. And we didn’t get to linger on her outfit like we did all other characters.

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