Little Miss Sunshine

Rating

Director

Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Screenplay

Michael Arndt

Length

101 min.

Starring

Abigail Breslin, Greg Kinnear, Paul Dano, Alan Arkin, Toni Collette, Steve Carell

MPAA Rating

R (For language, some sex and drug content)

Review

Can a road trip bring the members of a clashing family together or drive them farther apart. Little Miss Sunshine follows a formulaic path towards a long-winded closing act while providing plenty of humor along the way.

Olive (Abigail Breslin) isn’t a beauty. She’s small, overweight and wears glasses. She has a homely quality that would lend itself more to being picked on at school than to becoming a beauty pageant contestant. However, that is her dream. The film opens with her watching the Miss America pageant on television, mimicking the screw-in-a-light-bulb wave so many beauty queens have perfected. It is a dream that a particularly noisy patron laughed at when the idea was presented in the film.

Nonetheless, she receives a call from her aunt with whom she had stayed for a short time and whose call brings good news for the youngster. Her runner-up position at a local beauty pageant has met with success as the winner is disqualified because of scandal. It thus becomes the family’s goal to get Olive to California where she will compete in the next stage of the pageant.

What turns out to be a more dysfunctional road trip than Malcolm in the Middle and Married…with Children combined, the family piles in their dilapidated VW van and hops on the highway. What makes the family so ill-suited are their abjectly bizarre, and wholly unrealistic competing personalities.

The characters conspicuously lack depth. It isn’t until the superb performances are added that they begin to develop personalities of their own. Greg Kinnear is uncomfortably irritating as Richard, a wannabe motivational speaker whose nine-step program is filled with simplistic clichés and for which he can’t seem to get a book and tour deal. He fits perfectly into the role though by the end of the film, you’ve grown exasperated with his un-fatherly patronization of the members of the family. Alan Arkin is far more interesting as Richard’s father whose foul mouth and cocaine addiction make him seemingly ill-suited to be helping Olive with her pageant dance routine.

Toni Collette doesn’t branch out from her past roles as the family’s matriarch Sheryl. She also possesses the only lucidly normal character, which could be considered the outsider of the family. Their son Dwayne (Paul Dano) has adopted a vow of silence in honor of his philosophical hero Nietzsche until he can be accepted into flight school. Dano’s mute role doesn’t serve a great deal of purpose in the film. Dwayne’s a fringe character whose only purpose is to serve as a catalyst for many of the family’s later revelations.

It’s the performance of Steve Carell as Sheryl’s suicidal brother that unquestionably gives Little Miss Sunshine its soul. Carell isn’t one of my favorite comedians. I find his The Office character wholly irritating, but Frank is a fresh and intriguing character. He’s not the slapstick or motor-mouth character Carell’s known for playing. He gives Frank a compassionate and sensitive quality that, though depressive, is more unifying than any other in the film. It’s the strangely subdued nature of the performance that makes it the film’s best.

In one combative kitchen table dinner scene, every iota of conflict between the family members is revealed, though some nuggets are saved for further breakdowns alongside the van on the road. There aren’t many families this at-odds yet the concept makes for a comical diversion.

Though the film does play like an overlong sit-com and drags in its last act, it is still a enjoyable ride. Little Miss Sunshine is little more than your typical road trip movie. The only originality in the film is its interesting blend of characters and themes. The beauty pageant industry is certainly a topic of derision in the film and it isn’t hard to see why.

As a friend pointed out during the showing, it was scary looking at these little girls in humongous hairstyles (almost as large as the yare) and their sculpted and mannered appearances. The terrifying glazed looks in these girls’ eyes, the forced poise and the unending feeling of superiority permeates the final act of the film. It’s after this grim view of beauty pageants that things for this family finally start coming together. In unity, they lash out at the absurdity of their situation and knit themselves more closely together.

Little Miss Sunshine is billed as an independent film. Coming out of Sundance, it easily picked up a distributor and has already become a word-of-mouth success. The problem, however, is that it isn’t the avant-garde style of filmmaking that once typified the “independent” genre. On the surface, it appears to be an experiment of an unusual array of characters but with television networks like Fox presenting these bizarrely dysfunctional families on a consistent basis, the film lacks any truly original concept that distinguishes it from the pack.

One would imagine that being directed by a team best known for their music videos would lend the film to a brisk pace and limited downtime but that isn’t the case. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris don’t move the film along the way it should. The most glaring example is during Olive’s dance routine at the end of the film. Instead of shortening the song and moving the scene along, it drags on to nearly its full length. There is action during these scenes but after a while, it becomes tedious and difficult to watch.

After these scenes, the film’s denouement is quickly revealed and the credits roll despite the audience’s desire to see it go further, to learn more about the fates of these people. Instead, we’re forced to wonder what will become of the family. Will the unity last or will it falter like most such relationships do.

Little Miss Sunshine presents a plethora of entertaining situations and plenty of laughs but what could have been a far more rewarding experience isn’t. It’s the kind of film you enjoy once, digest and move on.

Review Written

September 15, 2006