LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
FOX
RELEASED 8 September 2006
The indie hit of the 2006 Sundance festival, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ has a triumvirate of proven comedic actors in Greg Kinnear (‘As Good As It Gets’), Steve Carell (‘The 40-Year Old Virgin’) and Alan Arkin (Oscar-winning performance in ‘The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming’), as well as the best actress working in Hollywood today, Toni Collette. New-comers Abigail Breslin (Olive) and Paul Dano (Dwayne) complete the dysfunctional family on the road trip of their lives.
Seven year-old Olive is invited to take part in the ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ competition in California, something she has dreamed of. This means the whole family must drive for three days in a battered yellow VW campervan to get there. Along for the ride are dad Richard, a failed motivational speaker who doesn’t believe in losers, grandad who is making the most of his last years by taking hard drugs, brother Dwayne who chooses not to speak and is hung up on Nietzsche, uncle Frank who has just survived a suicide attempt, and mum Sheryl who is trying her best to hold the fragile unit together. It’s questionable whether they’ll make it to Redondo Beach in one piece, let alone on time.
‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is a brilliant character study that only has a negligible plot, but thank god for that! So many films nowadays have no plot and no character development, or even what you could call characters to start with. Each actor is given equal screentime, which is rare enough in itself, and each character goes on something of a personal journey, irrevocably transformed over the three day road trip. Greg Kinnear’s Richard is a blinkered idiot who cannot see how he’s destroying his own family, telling his daughter not to eat ice cream and even regarding apologising as a sign of weakness. Alan Arkin gets the funniest moments as the outspoken grandad seemingly going through his second puberty. And Steve Carrell is the lovelorn gay uncle with no idea what his family mean to him anymore.
First-time directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have created a truthful portrait of family life that will be familiar to most of us in some way or another. The script by Michael Arndt has numerous one liners and contains fully-rounded people that exhibit no big screen tics so often favoured by ‘out-of-touch’ Hollywood screenwriters. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is very funny, and totally unsentimental, and is the feelgood movie of 2006.
FOUR OUT OF FIVE