Little Miss Sunshine (review)
Feel the Road to Hell
Something early on in the not-really-a-parody parody of depressing middle-class American life that is Little Miss Sunshine led me to an Epiphany about movies. At least, it felt like an Epiphany at the time, though now, in retrospect, looking at the words describing the Epiphany, it seems pretty obvious and even trite. But it’s this:
Movies either challenge the status quo, or they reinforce it.
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Not exactly earthshattering -- they’d have to do one or the other, wouldn’t they? -- and I realized that almost immediately, but I began to expand the Epiphany into a Theory anyway (big-budget mainstream studio films tend to reinforce, smaller independent films tend to challenge, except when they don’t). It made me feel real clever, picking out the flick’s indie ironies, little nuggets of status-quo-challenging smacks upside society’s head. Like suburban mom Sheryl’s (Toni Collette: The Night Listener, In Her Shoes) insistence that her family supplement their takeaway fast-food chicken dinner with at least a little 95-percent-water iceberg-lettuce salad -- she doesn’t use exactly those words, of course, and probably doesn’t realize the pointlessness of her insistence, but she loves her family and wants them to eat their (not-veggie) veggies, and that’s what counts, right? Like the urgent entrepreneurialism of dad Richard (Greg Kinnear: Robots, Godsend), pushing his success-now! whatever-step plan on his kids without seeing how it’s pushing them away, especially massively miserable teenaged Dwayne (Paul Dano: Taking Lives, The Emperor's Club). I felt all smart and intellectual. I felt like Sheryl’s brother, Frank (Steve Carell: The Office, Over the Hedge) the “most highly regarded Proust scholar in the United States,” who’s just come to stay with her family, except for Frank’s suicidal depression -- I’m not that bad off, not quite yet.
So what do you do with Little Miss Sunshine, as a person like me for whom disdaining the status quo is my status quo? How do you wrap your head around the fact that Little Miss Sunshine really is just the indie challenging-the-status-quo status quo? Is anyone who is inclined to check out Little Miss Sunshine going to be the kind of person who won’t roll their eyes at the idea that a fast food dinner may be nutritionally redeemed by the application of iceberg lettuce? Of course not.
So what you do is this: You embrace this film wholeheartedly anyway, because after it gets the initial smacks of satire out of the way, it becomes genuinely heartfelt, full of raw emotional power in a way that isn’t about satire -- though there’s plenty of that still to come -- but about the things we do for the people we love even though the people we love drive us batshit crazy. This is my absolute favorite movie of the year so far, and not because, in the end, it holds up for well-deserved ridicule the obscenity of “beauty pageants” for little girls, though it does do that, in a brilliant and laugh-out-loud way that I should have seen coming but didn’t. It is my favorite movie of the year for all the little touches along the literal and figurative road it takes to get there.
The bulk of the movie -- from music-video directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, working from a script by first-timer Michael Arndt -- consists of the roadtrip from hell the family goes on in order to get young Olive (Abigail Breslin: The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, Signs) to the Little Miss Sunshine competition, to which she has been invited at the last minute. This is her dream come true, and none of them can bear to break her heart. So all these characters who are in constant battle with one another over absolutely everything are tossed into a VW van for a drive of hundreds and hundres of miles and have to not kill one another in spite of the many disasters they encounter. Too many disasters to be believed? Maybe. But any absurdity -- not that there’s anything wrong with absurdity -- is more than trumped by that raw emotional power. Like the tiny but poignant scene in which Kinnear makes a phone call and gets the worst news he can imagine -- we don’t hear the other end of that call, we just see his face fall: Kinnear makes you feel like you can almost hear his heart sink. Like the hilarious and heartrending bit in which Dano’s Dwayne, who has taken a vow of silence, must wordlessly convey his desperate need for his father to pull the van off the road (and it’s not for the reason you’re thinking).
Hilarious and heartrending is a pretty good phrase in which to wrap up Little Miss Sunshine, in fact. Think too much about it, and you’ll realize that in its outline, it’s not exactly full of nothing we haven’t seen before (in fact, it’s kinda an indie-flavored spin on National Lampoon’s Vacation!). But let yourself feel it, and you’ll be under its spell for good.
(Technorati tags: Little Miss Sunshine, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Abigail Breslin)
viewed at a private screening with an audience of criticsrated R for language, some sex and drug content
official site | IMDB
comments
posted by Shadowen (August 11, 2006 2:28 AM)
And you even identify the problem with your own theory right in the review: which status quo are we talking about?
i.e. Fahrenheit 9/11. A liberal might have said the movie challenged. A conservative might have said it challenged (if he thinks the status quo--Bush in power, etc.--is good) or reinforced (if he thinks the status quo--the liberal media out to get Bush, etc.--is bad). A neutral observer might say it reinforced because it preached to the choir, or challenged because it's a relatively huge movie in a land where the mainstream media were until that point unabashedly pro-War.
The trick is to identify the status quo the movie affects.
posted by paul (October 22, 2006 7:35 PM)
Loved this movie and rally enjoyed your review. Got a laugh out of the National lampoon reference and noted it during the scene with grandad in the trunk. The scene at the start with the salad put the family firmly in the a american disposable life cliche, but I've got to say that what I noticed most in those scenes was just how ungly the house was, not very incisive I know but it definalty helped explian the family to me quickly (nobody could like this interior yet there they all were) What I got most from this movie and this another thing in common woth the griswalds is that family as problems and the movie doesn/t solve any of them but they do love each other and in the end its your family that will be there. This is what always redeems America in general, no matter how messed up the parts the sum always amounts to something.