MOVIE REVIEWS
Little Miss Sunshine
Eric Yang
If Little Miss Sunshine is one of the year’s best films, it is because there are few good films out there this year. Critics have already placed this Sundance hit in the Dysfunctional Family Movie Hall of Fame, right next to last year’s The Squid and the Whale. Sunshine, however, is hardly a classic, though it is an amusing and occasionally hilarious road trip.
Greg Kinnear plays Richard Hoover, a wannabe motivational speaker who’s so enamored with himself and his “9-steps” to success that he’s forgotten how to succeed as a father. He’s the glue that doesn’t hold the family together. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), brings home her brother, Frank (Steve Carell), to stay with them after his failed suicide attempt. Frank is a Proust scholar who has been distraught over a male student of his who doesn’t love him back.
We meet Richard and Sheryl’s daughter, little Olive, who is an aspiring beauty queen. Their teenage son Dwayne is a Nietzsche worshipper who refuses to speak until he is accepted into the Air Force Academy. Finally, there’s Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a war veteran who has only recently started snorting cocaine.
When Olive discovers she’s eligible for the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, the entire family, unable to afford a plane trip, is forced to embark on a road trip to California.
The filmmakers find clever ways to put the family in “outrageous” situations, but these aren’t characters, they’re caricatures. Their idiosyncrasies are too contrived, too laboriously crafted, for us to empathize with, and their personal dilemmas never go beyond sitcom territory.
Still, Sunshine’s relentless charm is hard to dismiss. The directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, have a gleeful command of domestic chaos; they revel in it, turning the most trivial family squabbles into a mesmerizing display of cinematic pandemonium.
But what, exactly, does the Hoover family learn? Something about never giving up. For our benefit, Dayton and Faris make a statement about American culture, how superficiality feeds us while keeping us starved at the same time. The Hoovers, unfortunately, remain blind to their own fallacies.
Ultimately, Little Miss Sunshine isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey. It’s an enjoyable excursion, to be sure, but in the end I wondered what the fuss was all about. I’ve seen far more interesting dysfunctional families in real life, and trust me, the sun don’t shine on them.
