dir: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
[img_assist|nid=873|title=This little bitch is responsible for getting whole generations of kids onto acid|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=268]
Even though it looks like just another American film about just another dysfunctional American family, Little Miss Sunshine has more going for it than that. At the very least, it manages to provoke a few more chuckles than the average film of this type usually does.
True, there’s no shortage of movies, both mainstream and art-house, that try to outdo and out-quirk each other with crazy families and their crazy adventures on the road to getting to their version of a happy ending. The lazy message always is, no matter how wacky and insane members of your family are, they’re still your family. So, you know, appreciate them for who they are.
Well, this film boasts a quirky collection of characters, and has the same predictable message regarding the thickness of blood versus water. But it ends up being a lot more fun that usual, even if it doesn’t have anything new to say about anything.
Olive (Abigail Breslin) is a cute little awkward girl who somehow makes it to the finals of a beauty pageant for cute little girls. For various unimportant reasons, her entire family has to accompany her on a cross-country trip in an old Volkswagen Kombi van as they try to get to Los Angeles for the competition.
Along for the ride are her drug-using, foul-mouthed grandfather (Alan Arkin), her Nietzsche-worshipping brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) who has taken a vow of silence until he becomes an air force pilot, her suicidal uncle (Steve Carrell) who’s depressed about no longer being the number one scholar on Marcel Proust in the United States, her motivational speaker father Richard (Greg Kinnear) and her mother Sheryl. The only thing remarkable about Sheryl is that she is played by Australian actress Toni Collette.
As with any road movie, the majority of the film is taken up with the implausible adventures that occur to the family along the highway. When two sets of clichés collide, such as by merging the road movie genre with the dysfunctional, quirky family genre, you can either get something more than the sum of its parts, like this, or something less.
Little Miss Sunshine manages to avoid smothering the flick in sentimentality, and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t bother to make too many Big Statements about the state of the American family, because it doesn’t need to. The people in this family sound, on paper, unreal, but they’re well-written and well-acted. They seem real enough to be entertaining, but not so real that they become annoying.
Olive is played as a kid, which is surprising, because most of the kids in films of this type tend to regularly spout wise phrases as if they are midget philosophers, old beyond their years. Her pudgy body and glasses that are too big for her face highlight her ungainly charm, and she manages to be quite charming in the role.
Alan Arkin plays the degenerate grandfather with obvious relish, enjoying the fact that he gets to use a lot of dialogue that he has otherwise avoided over the course of his lengthy career. He’s always giving people advice, and, much of the time, it’s not the kind of advice you’d expect from a noble, aged grandparent. It should be emphasised that whilst this is definitely a film about a family, it is definitely not a film for the whole family to enjoy. Salty language and adult themes abound.
Comedian Steve Carrell, better known for his roles in movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman, plays his role straight down the line, and garners laughs all the same.
He’s very good as the depressed uncle. The reasons for his breakdown don’t really matter, and are as farcical as many of the other elements in the film, but he manages to be the observer that acts as our entry point into this strange family’s dynamics. He expresses the shock and disbelief at some of the things going on in the family that we might feel in the same situation.
Greg Kinnear has made a career out of playing two kinds of characters: arrogant jerks and inadequate jerks. Here, as Richard, he manages to combine both ends of the spectrum by playing an arrogant but inadequate motivational speaker, who doesn’t sound like he believes his own speeches. He does well with the role, by being an awful person, but not so awful that he can’t be tolerated.
The whole motivational speaker aspect, where Richard divides the world into winners and losers, combined with the way the film treats the horrifying spectacle of the beauty pageant towards the film’s climax, underscores the movie’s keen satirical edge. The real target of the movie’s barbs is not the American Family, but the American obsession with competitiveness. It makes its dual points quite well: that striving to achieve your dreams is more important that winning or losing, and that some competitions aren’t worth competing in.
It also makes the point that if you love somebody, you should have no problem embarrassing yourself to save them from harm.
Most of the actors do good work in their roles, and the two directors manage to keep the tone fairly light and the pacing moving along at a steady clip, to stop the flick from getting too slow or too bogged down in its own seriousness.
Though the film is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the pageant towards the end manages to be both scathing towards the way these little girls are treated, and downright hilarious when Olive gets to perform the dance routine Grandpa helped her choreographed.
Nothing is resolved by film’s end. No-one learns a deep or meaningful lesson about life, love or the wonderfulness of family. The family remains as messed-up at the end as they were at the beginning. But they’re a little bit better off, because they realise, like we do, that the point of following your dreams and fighting for what you want isn’t whether you win or lose, but how many people you annoyed along the way.
8 times that scene with the cop and the porno mags, especially when it comes down to the magazine Buns and Ammo, is the funniest scene in cinema this year out of 10
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“Who’s that? Nietzsche? So you stopped talking because of Friedrich Nietzsche?” – Little Miss Sunshine.
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