Little Miss Sunshine
**½
Directed by Jonathan Dayton
and Valeri Faris
Little Miss Sunshine actors, left to right, Abigail Breslin, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, and Greg Kinnear (AP)
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Written by Michael Arndt
Starring Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell and Toni Collette
Classification: 14A
Arising out of the dark winter at the Sundance Film Festival, Little Miss Sunshine was this year's unofficial winner of the hype prize, with an eight-figure studio deal and a stack of glowing reviews.
Whether this mildly diverting celebration of loserdom ends up as a hit (like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite) or a dud (like Happy, Texas, Tadpole or Pieces of April) remains to be seen. So far, its chances look good. With a strong cast (led by The 40 Year-Old Virgin's Steve Carrell), and a canny, bipolar script that manages to be pro-crazy-family while indicting America's winner-take-all culture, it assumes the condescending moral high ground without sacrificing lowbrow yuks.
Created by former music-video and commercial directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine is reminiscent of As Good As It Gets, another road trip movie sitcom that forces together a group of characters who have nothing in common. In this case, upping the ante, the people who have nothing in common are members of the same New Mexico family, the Hoovers. The opening sequence introduces the dad, Richard (Greg Kinnear), a motivational speaker, delivering his nine-step PowerPoint message to what turns out to be a handful of students in an adult-learning class.
Back at the house, Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a foul-mouthed old porn hound who has been thrown out of his seniors residence for snorting heroin. In his bedroom, teenaged son Dwayne (Paul Dano) maintains a vow of silence while pumping weights under a Nietzsche poster. In the living room, pudgy, bespectacled seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin) stares rapt at the television, watching a tape of the Miss America pageant and re-enacting each fulsome gesture.
Meanwhile, mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) arrives at the hospital to pick up Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), a gay Proust scholar who has attempted suicide after losing his boyfriend to a rival.
That night, Sheryl serves dinner -- a paper bucket of fried chicken and a bottle of Sprite -- while they discuss Uncle Frank's suicide attempt. Then Dad remembers a phone message. Olive, the runner-up to a local child's beauty contest, has become the default candidate in the national contest at Redondo Beach, Calif., just 700 miles from their Albuquerque home. Dad suggests they pile into the dilapidated Volkswagen minibus and make the journey. Maybe he can stop in Scottsdale, Ariz., and visit a venture capitalist who may save him from incipient bankruptcy.
The bus repeatedly needs a running push to get started; Grandpa talks trash; Paul, instead of speaking, writes angry notes ("Welcome to Hell."). Sheryl laughs as Uncle Frank runs a sarcastic commentary to Dad's upbeat sales talk. Aside from the Nietzsche and Proust name-dropping, none of this is markedly different from National Lampoon's Family Vacation.
As the bus rolls along, Little Miss Sunshine accumulates a few more human dimensions. Alan Arkin, the great comic actor from the sixties, brings some tenderness to his cartoon wacky grandpa role. Otherwise, the script's favourite device is to show how the family unites against one intransigent bureaucrat (a hospital administrator) after another (a snooty beauty pageant official) to find unity in resentment.
The movie's final act is something else entirely. In a post-JonBenet Ramsey world, a child's beauty pageant is an awfully easy symbol of a culture gone insane, a point the movie doesn't fail to over-emphasize. The announcer is a lacquered and bronzed idiot; the audience is made up of stage parents and pedophiles. Worst of all, the contestants, with gobs of makeup and sprayed hairdos, look like midget hookers from the 1950s.
Naturally, the Hoovers try hard to dissuade their darling from jumping into this snake pit, but she is determined. When Olive unveils her performance, previously seen only by her grandfather, the movie is lent its one genuinely heartfelt laugh. Though Little Miss Sunshine is consistently contrived in its characters' too-cute misery, the conclusion, which is genuinely outrageous and uplifting, is almost worth the hype.
