A financially strapped motivational speaker who can't motivate anyone to listen to him. A Nietzsche-loving teenaged Ubermensch who hasn't uttered a word in over a year. A foul-mouthed, drug-sniffing, porn-addicted granddad. A jilted, suicidal gay man who also happens to be the country's foremost authority on Marcel Proust.
So what do these people have in common? Well, nothing — and that's precisely the joke fueling Little Miss Sunshine, the current darling of the Sundance crowd, and the feel-good bummer of the summer.
It's impossible to talk about Little Miss Sunshine without using the word "dysfunctional," so let's waste no more time getting to it. Little Miss Sunshine is a comedy — make that bittersweet comedy (the only kind that will really do at Sundance) — about a deeply dysfunctional family comprised of the previously mentioned oddballs, plus one or two others. It's the sort of movie where a typical dinner conversation might include a glassy-eyed grown-up explaining exactly how and why he recently attempted to slit his wrists to his dumbstruck 7-year-old niece. And because this explanation is so wildly inappropriate and offered in such a matter-of-fact, deadpan manner, Little Miss Sunshine is also, ostensibly, funny.
The family under the microscope in Little Miss Sunshine are the Hoovers, an odd yet weirdly appealing clan nominally headed up by bumbling dad Richard (Greg Kinnear), whose failure as a motivational speaker only makes his loser status all the more pathetic. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) bickers with Dad and drives everyone else crazy trying to keep the family together, while her brother Frank (Steve Carell) is fresh from a suicide attempt after being dumped by his boyfriend.
To keep Frank from another go at self-annihilation, he's forced to bunk with his teenaged nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano) — choice irony, since mute, sullen Dwayne is himself the spitting image of a budding Columbine kid, so the whole scenario feels a lot like one ticking time bomb watching another.
Meanwhile, cranky old Grandpa (Alan Arkin) spews forth a continuous, lewd rant of epic proportions, and offers occasional nuggets of fractured wisdom to granddaughter Olive, a cheerful and slightly chubby second-grader who qualifies as the "normal one" in the family. Olive's got her own quirks — she's obsessed with beauty pageants, particularly the titular contest for tykes — but compared to the obsessions and peccadilloes of the other Hoovers, she's the very picture of sanity.
Little Miss Sunshine is all about gawking at geeks, as will be abundantly clear even from the film's opening moments, where little Olive sits glued to the cheesy televised spectacle of a beauty queen being crowned. The movie's fascination with the grotesque is its main calling card and, on the surface, it doesn't appear to be all that different from something you might find in an early Farrelly Brothers project, or even some snarky Todd Solondz film. Olive, for instance, is initially shot in wide-angled Welcome to the Dollhouse-ish close-up, emphasizing too-large glasses that make her look even more ridiculous. And when the Hoovers sit down to eat, the camera ghoulishly lingers over the tacky bucket of KFC on the table, then makes sure we've noticed their Mickey D glassware by supplying a helpful close-up.
Condescending? Maybe. But Little Miss Sunshine also tries very hard (maybe too hard) to give us the impression of caring about its characters. The movie is ultimately much more interested in being endearing than offensive (or, heaven forbid, edgy), and that's a big part of why its fans are likely to include more than a few viewers who've walked out of at least one Solondz film. Husband and wife co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris diligently avoid letting comic exaggeration slide into cruelty (something of which Solondz is forever being accused), supplying their characters (and us) with a comforting squeeze of the hand whenever possible or even a full-blown group hug, and adding a sweetened soundtrack to the mix. The intention here is that we're supposed to walk away from even the most potentially unpleasant scenes feeling uplifted rather than dirty.
The result is a movie that's often undeniably amusing, but that also feels a little forced as it struggles to balance its quirkiness with the big, fat heart it wears so proudly on its sleeve. In fact, the movie that Little Miss Sunshine resembles most, far more than any acidic Solondz assault, is National Lampoon's Vacation — especially since Dayton and Faris' film eventually becomes one long, mishap-laden and slapsticky family road-trip.
Olive learns that, improbably enough, she's a contestant in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, and Mom insists the whole family pile into their beat-up VW van to accompany her on the 700-mile trek from Albuquerque to the contest site in Redondo Beach.
Mayhem, as if you hadn't guessed, ensues, from mechanical problems with the van, to painfully comic encounters with cops, to the prefab wackiness of driving around with a corpse in the back seat. The weirdness spills out in all directions, a little calculated but agreeably energetic, until it culminates in the pageant, where the movie gets to revel in the horrifying spectacle of heavily rouged and lacquered 7-year-olds vamping across the stage like baby hookers. Even here, though, Little Miss Sunshine plays things a bit safe, and the scene winds up more cute than genuinely scary (albeit with a great last-minute surprise that goes a long way toward redeeming previous missteps).
Through it all, the film continues to gently massage its disenfranchised characters into vaguely pathetic figures of fun, but Little Miss Sunshine only really show its fangs when it lays into the various "normal" types encountered along the way. Compared to these even easier and shallower targets (petty bureaucrats, social climbers: cartoonish figures of authority and privilege, all), the Hoover misfits begin to seem not nearly so messed up. They're perennial losers, sure, but they're also beautiful — if only by default. And this is, of course, the Big Point the movie wants us to get.
Everything is fair game in Little Miss Sunshine, the more awkward and embarrassing the better, but the film wants to make absolutely, positively sure we know that it really, really loves its beautiful losers.
Its hopelessly screwed-up, misbehaving freaks are our freaks, after all. They're family. And even if that message comes off as a touch insincere, small matter. All those rude, crude and often very funny jokes may just keep you from noticing.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.
