Little Miss Sunshine
Review by Fritz Esker
I attended the Antigravity Alternative Media Expo Saturday. In doing so, I sat next to the guys who run Backporch Revolution, a local indie record label (www.backporchrevolution.com). They are also the brains behind the "New Orleans: Proud to Swim Home" bumper stickers. They've been donating all of the profits to charity (either Habitat for Humanity, The Humane Society, or MusiCares) and they're generally cool guys, so check them out.
The previews for Little Miss Sunshine made it look like a forced, annoying indie quirkfest, the kind of film that thinks it is being clever by making its characters as bizarre and freakish as possible. Thankfully, the end result is nothing like this. Little Miss Sunshine, in actuality, is a rarity and a likely cross-over hit. It is thoughtful, dark, and quirky enough to please the indie crowd, while funny and crowd-pleasing enough to please more mainstream audiences.
Olive (Abigail Breslin) is a seven-year-old in Albuquerque who aspires to be a beauty queen. Because the local winner had to bow out because of a mysterious drug mishap, Olive, as the local runner-up, is appointed as representative for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California. Olive's family piles into their barely functional VW Bus to make the 700-mile drive to California. Along for the ride are Olive's father Richard (Greg Kinnear), her mother Sheryl (Toni Collette), her suicidal gay uncle (Steve Carell), her mute-by-choice older brother (Paul Dano), and her heroin-sniffing grandpa (Alan Arkin).
In many ways, Little Miss Sunshine is about coping with failure. Arkin's character has been kicked out of his retirement community for drug use and promiscuity. Kinnear is a struggling motivational speaker who views failure of any kind as a deep character flaw, even though he himself is not successful at his business. Carell loved a man who did not love him back and his ensuing breakdown led him to be fired from his teaching job at a university. Even the characters who, at the outset, have not yet failed, seemed destined for failure. Dano's Nietzsche-reading iconoclast wants to be a pilot for the Air Force, but he really does not seem to be suited for the military. Breslin's pudgy, bespectacled aspiring beauty queen is a charming and sweet-natured child, but she really does not seem like beauty pageant material. Part of the film's charm lies in its message that failure may be inevitable, but that what matters in life is that when you fail, you should do so with energy, originality, and be able to get up off the ground fast enough to try again.
The film's principals are excellent, from screenwriter Michael Arndt to first-time feature directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris to the entire cast. In particular, the writing of Kinnear's character is well done. At first, I wanted to throttle Kinnear (which, I suppose, means he was convincing as a motivational speaker - my least favorite profession in the world) and he is initially the least likeable of all the characters. In viewing the entire world in black-or-white, all-or-nothing terms that state that anyone can do anything if they only try hard enough, he is sending dangerous messages to his young daughter. In a way, he made me think of people who have blamed New Orleanians for Hurricane Katrina. Most, if not all of those people, live in their own little world where they want to believe that bad things don't happen to good people and that if failure or disaster befalls you, then it's because you were in some way to blame. Similarly, Kinnear splits people into categories of winners and losers. Anyone who fails to be number one does so because he/she was in some way deficient. Such an insufferable character could easily become a villain or a one-note caricature. However, Kinnear captures the gnawing insecurity at the heart of his character and, by the end of the film, actually comes off as sympathetic in spite of his flaws.
Steve Carell continues on his recent hot streak. He has been fantastic in Anchorman, TV's The Office, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and now this. In all four pieces of work, he has made four completely different roles his own. Here, he makes a very vivid characterization of an academic whose world has fallen apart around him. From vocal inflections to the slightest changes in posture, every part of Carell's performance is believable.
The same could be said for the rest of the cast, all of whom help make their characters into three-dimensional human beings. If one were to nitpick the film it all, it would be that it sometimes a little too readily calls to mind other films. A major plot point is reminiscent of an identical one in National Lampoon's Vacation (another film I really like) and the film's finale recalls that of About a Boy (also an excellent film).
However, these are minor quibbles. In a summer that has noticeably lacked any films that could be classified in the "very good" category, Little Miss Sunshine salvages something from what has otherwise been an eminently forgettable summer movie season.