Little Miss Sunshine
The road movie has long been a staple of Hollywood cinema. The Farrelly brothers have made a career out of them. It’s pretty easy to understand why, all you really need is a bunch of loosely sketched out characters, who you then throw into and ever increasingly ridiculous set of circumstances. Usually these things just get wilder and wilder until the feels completely fall off, but that’s not the case with Little Miss Sunshine.
Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin) has been chosen by default to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine child beauty pageant and since no combination of the rest of the members of her family can trusted to be left alone, they all have to go with her. So her frazzled mother (Toni Collette) and father (Greg Kinear) the struggling motivational speaker, mute misanthrope brother (Paul Dano) , heroin snorting grandfather (Alan Arkin) and her uncle (Steve Carrell) the Proust scholar who is recovering after a failed suicide attempt all cram into their beat up VW Van and head off to sunny California. This is a group of people who can really at time really try each others patience, but for Olive’s sake they suck it up and make the trip.
A lot of credit must be given to this cast. These guys all hit each note pretty much perfectly, when they need to be sentimental they are sentimental, when they need to be funny they’re funny, but they do it all so effortlessly. Each one shifts gears several times throughout this film without ever making it seem forced or unnatural. Greg Kinnear is perfect for his role as an uptight failure and Carrell dials his performance back so that he fits right in the ensemble. However the centerpiece is Abigail Breslin. You would have been hard pressed to find a young actress that not only makes you believe that all these people would be willing to get together and help her, but can carry the heart of this film as well.
Sunshine really could have been a huge mess if it wasn’t for the direction of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. They keep everything very smart and very simple, without that we could have been forced to watch another RV. Even they couldn’t have done their job if it wasn’t for the incredibly well written screenplay by first time writer, Michael Arndt. He is able to blend wacky over the top scenes with intelligent comedy and a genuine message that at no point feels out of place.
This is a film about misfits. It’s a group of people that don’t really belong anywhere and each one is a failure in their own special way. Even though they are strong individual characters and don’t always get along, the only people that will have them are each other. After all, isn’t a family just a bunch of people who will be there for you no matter how big a loser you are?
The Grade
- Story: A
- Acting: B+
- Visuals: B+
- Originality: A
- Enjoyability: A+
- Overall: A
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