Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine

by Alex Bentley

An independent film, it likely won’t get the theatrical audience it deserves. But it outperforms every other comedy released this year, and not by a small margin.

At the root of almost all comedies is dysfunction. After all, watching people get along and having everything go right is pretty boring, especially on the big screen. So, yes, the basic framework of Little Miss Sunshine is one you’ve seen a thousand times before. But what the film may lack in setup originality it more than makes up for execution. It combines its dysfunctional family with the old-fashioned road trip and comes up with pure comedy gold.

The cast of characters in Little Miss Sunshine reads like, if there is such a thing, a laundry list of weirdness. The father, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a failing motivational speaker (oh, the irony), preaching his nine-step program and telling anybody who’ll listen that if you’re not a winner, you’re a loser. Son Dwayne (Paul Dano) apparently worships Friedrich Nietzsche (he’s engrossed in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”) and has taken a vow of silence. Seven-year-old daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) dreams of becoming a beauty queen, which is all well and good until she encounters the creepy reality of pre-adolescent beauty pageants. Uncle Frank (Steve Carell) is, apropos of nothing, the second-most preeminent Proust scholar in the U.S.; he also happens to be gay and to have just failed at committing suicide. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) is outwardly normal, but her relationship with Richard seems to be deteriorating, and she’s doing her best just to keep the family moving forward. It gets to the point that the most honest person in the whole clan is the heroin-snorting, porn-loving, foul-mouthed Grandpa (Alan Arkin), who at least has the guts to say what he means and isn’t afraid to try and connect with every member of the family in some small way.

All this wackiness comes to a head when Olive lands a spot in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and the whole gang loads up in their bright yellow VW minibus to travel from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach. As always seems to happen on movie road trips, everything that can go wrong does, but Sunshine separates itself from, say, National Lampoon’s Vacation or Road Trip by keeping its heart intact throughout. While those two films were mostly full-on comedies with little aim except to make you laugh, Sunshine always maintains its focus on the family unit. Their interactions may be off the charts in terms of appropriateness and sometimes respect, but they’re a family nonetheless. As mentioned, never is this more evident than in the character of Grandpa. Despite haranguing nearly every member of the family and being stuck in his ways, his influence is what keeps them going. This comes full circle in the movie’s final sequence.

Without giving anything away, the ending provides perhaps the most sustained and boisterous laughs you’re likely to experience this year. That you’re laughing at something highly inappropriate only speaks more to the charm and success of the film as a whole.

That success also stems from pitch perfect casting in almost every role. Breslin is spunky, innocent and touching as Olive; Dano takes a non-speaking role and fills it with extreme amounts of pathos; Collette and Kinnear play off each other well and bring a touch of Oscar class to the proceedings (both having been nominated before); Arkin does that as well, but he puts forth a completely different role than you expect from him, and is the heart of the movie as a result; and Carell continues his streak of comic brilliance, this time combining a hint of his character from The Office with genuine dramatic angst, and pulls it off flawlessly.

An independent film, Little Miss Sunshine likely won’t get the theatrical audience it deserves. But it outperforms every other comedy released this year, and not by a small margin.

This article was submitted by a member of the TexasGigs community.