Review of Little Miss Sunshine (2006) by Markbayer — 01 Oct 2006

The fact that late-summer audiences so enthusiastically embraced this mildly likable but largely derivative, unimaginative family comedy-drama/ social satire/ road movie/ would-be Microcosm of America is proof positive that at the end of an even more dismally mindless movie summer than usual, moviegoers are absolutely starved for anything that presents even an illusion of intelligence, originality or depth.

The family dinner in the Hoover household that opens the movie, and in which all their goals, problems, conflicts and neuroses are artlessly laid out for us, is as clunky, amateurish and contrived as the worst Screenwriting 101 project can get, and the movie misses what should've been some easy, obvious targets completely: even though it tries to get some symbolic mileage out of dad Richard's aspiring career as a motivational speaker, a cursory viewing of a 3 AM infomercial featuring Tony Robbins and Leeza Gibbons yields far more pertinent (if unintentional) commentary about the motivation-for-money business than anything seen here.

Acting is uneven: Greg Kinnear (Richard) mined the American Everyman field to much greater results in this year's earlier The Matador, while Alan Arkin, as a dirty old druggie grandpa, adds nothing new to that hoary old independent movie cliché.

(But don't be surprised if, like Don Ameche and James Coburn, he walks off with a Lifetime Achievement --oops, Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this trite performance!) On the other hand, Toni Collette, as beleaguered mom Sheryl, proves once again, as she's recently done in The Night Whisperer and In Her Shoes, that she's any movie's secret weapon, while Steve Carell, who at this point in his career seems incapable of doing ANYTHING wrong, balances his manic, hilarious vocal work as Hammy the Squirrel in Over the Hedge with a wonderfully subtle, nuanced portrayal of Sheryl's suicidal gay brother.

And the kids are alright, too: Paul Dano, as the Hoovers' resolutely mute son, says more with silences than many actors do with pages of dialogue, while Abigail Breslin, as would-be child beauty pageant contestant Olive, is a joy to watch because she's so thoroughly unaffected.

(An Entertainment Weekly interview with her revealed that what she wanted right now more than anything else was to catch a frog. That seems to explain it.) In fact, little Olive herself is so sweet, sensible and thoroughly NORMAL that you can't help but wonder who left her in a basket on the Hoovers' doorstep many years ago; I loved how, even though she very much wants to be in this pageant, she's mature enough to sacrifice it on several occasions when a family crisis appears to interfere.

And although one of those emergencies will prove instantly recognizable to anyone who's seen National Lampoon's Vacation, the movie really accelerates at roughly the same pace at which the Hoovers' smiley-face yellow van breaks down.

The situations (and the family's reaction to them) get funnier, and the movie barrels into a terrific beauty pageant finale (with no small assistance by Beth Grant, who as an officious official, is a marvelous comic foil) in which Olive innocently exposes children's beauty pageants for the truly repellent, disgusting obscenities that they are.

A lovely, Chaplinesque final shot ices the cake, but the question remains: is Little Miss Sunshine's dynamite finish enough to compensate for the sluggishness of most of what precedes it and bump it from a 6 to a 7? Well, let's put it this way, if the fierceness of its attack on kiddie pageants were enough to get them run off the face of the earth, it just might.

..but then, the JonBenet Ramsey murder (whose recent reemergence as a news story provided this movie with the most unsavory free publicity since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident boosted The China Syndrome back in 1979) wasn't quite enough to get those pedophilic meat parades banned, so.

..