Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine
This is the best movie I’ve seen this year.
Frank (Steve Carell), the number one Proust scholar in America, has come to live with his sister’s family following a failed suicide attempt. He will be convalescing with his sister (who chain-smokes to keep herself together), his sister’s husband (a failing motivational speaker), her husband’s father (a heroin user and swearword abuser), his nephew (who doesn’t speak by choice) and his niece (who is probably the only close to normal person in the family). When the niece, Olive, gets a chance to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, everyone piles into an aged VW bus and goes to California. Various trials and tribulations come their way, and of course they learn to love each other as a family.
All the characters should feel forced and fake, but that’s what I think the brilliance of this movie is. None of these people are exactly true-to-life, but they’re close enough. They and the situations they’re put in probably couldn’t happen to you, but they might. Everyone has his or her eccentricities, if you know him or her long enough, but in a movie you don’t have that kind of time. Exaggerations are made so personality traits are clearer. It’s reality taken just one step closer to the absurd. Not so far that everything feels ludicrous to the audience, but just enough to make every pitfall the family runs into humorous. And it’s not painful humor either, like Meet the Parents, where Ben Stiller’s pain is the audience’s source of laughter.
Steve Carell is excellent, playing his character alternately subdued and then veering off into something resembling mania. He’s recovering from what seems like an endless string of failures: professionally, of the heart, of even killing himself. Every time he turns around, something is there to remind him. He mostly withdraws, but comes back to the family in insane bursts when in a fight with Richard, or when the family has to work together to get the car going.
Greg Kinear (Richard, the husband), my favorite thing ever to come out of the E! Network, does a fantastic job with the tightly wound motivational speaker who will do anything to avoid being a loser. I think he might have done the best job, if just because he had the most obvious character arc. At the start, he’s an asshole, and you want to smack him. But his insecurities come out and he, well, grows up a bit.
Toni Collette (Sheryl, the sister) is great too, as is Alan Arkin as the grandfather. Everyone does an excellent job, not only with dialogue, but with body acting and facial expressions as well. Everyone is giving his or her entire package in the film.
I want to recognize the child actors especially. Paul Dano, who played Dwayne (the son), did an amazing job, considering he did have a single line of dialogue until the movie was 3/4th over. He reacted to everything hilariously, and had the perfect facial expression for whatever he wrote on the notebook he used to communicate. Abigail Breslin, whom I loved in Signs, was also excellent. She was excellent at being more than a wound up little girl competing in a pageant she was clearly outmatched in. She was very sensitive, and really made you feel for Olive and her dreams.
In conclusion, what really made this movie for me was that it was ostensibly about a dysfunctional family, but ended up being about a family, that despite all the quirks and arguments, really did function. It wasn’t about the individual weirdness each character displayed, but about the way they all came together and loved each other. It’s also absolutely hilarious. The audience I was with laughed almost continually, and clapped at the end.
Frank (Steve Carell), the number one Proust scholar in America, has come to live with his sister’s family following a failed suicide attempt. He will be convalescing with his sister (who chain-smokes to keep herself together), his sister’s husband (a failing motivational speaker), her husband’s father (a heroin user and swearword abuser), his nephew (who doesn’t speak by choice) and his niece (who is probably the only close to normal person in the family). When the niece, Olive, gets a chance to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, everyone piles into an aged VW bus and goes to California. Various trials and tribulations come their way, and of course they learn to love each other as a family.
All the characters should feel forced and fake, but that’s what I think the brilliance of this movie is. None of these people are exactly true-to-life, but they’re close enough. They and the situations they’re put in probably couldn’t happen to you, but they might. Everyone has his or her eccentricities, if you know him or her long enough, but in a movie you don’t have that kind of time. Exaggerations are made so personality traits are clearer. It’s reality taken just one step closer to the absurd. Not so far that everything feels ludicrous to the audience, but just enough to make every pitfall the family runs into humorous. And it’s not painful humor either, like Meet the Parents, where Ben Stiller’s pain is the audience’s source of laughter.
Steve Carell is excellent, playing his character alternately subdued and then veering off into something resembling mania. He’s recovering from what seems like an endless string of failures: professionally, of the heart, of even killing himself. Every time he turns around, something is there to remind him. He mostly withdraws, but comes back to the family in insane bursts when in a fight with Richard, or when the family has to work together to get the car going.
Greg Kinear (Richard, the husband), my favorite thing ever to come out of the E! Network, does a fantastic job with the tightly wound motivational speaker who will do anything to avoid being a loser. I think he might have done the best job, if just because he had the most obvious character arc. At the start, he’s an asshole, and you want to smack him. But his insecurities come out and he, well, grows up a bit.
Toni Collette (Sheryl, the sister) is great too, as is Alan Arkin as the grandfather. Everyone does an excellent job, not only with dialogue, but with body acting and facial expressions as well. Everyone is giving his or her entire package in the film.
I want to recognize the child actors especially. Paul Dano, who played Dwayne (the son), did an amazing job, considering he did have a single line of dialogue until the movie was 3/4th over. He reacted to everything hilariously, and had the perfect facial expression for whatever he wrote on the notebook he used to communicate. Abigail Breslin, whom I loved in Signs, was also excellent. She was excellent at being more than a wound up little girl competing in a pageant she was clearly outmatched in. She was very sensitive, and really made you feel for Olive and her dreams.
In conclusion, what really made this movie for me was that it was ostensibly about a dysfunctional family, but ended up being about a family, that despite all the quirks and arguments, really did function. It wasn’t about the individual weirdness each character displayed, but about the way they all came together and loved each other. It’s also absolutely hilarious. The audience I was with laughed almost continually, and clapped at the end.