Little Miss Sunshine: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

“Little Miss Sunshine” is all about failure--personal failure, public failure, professional failure, romantic failure, car failure, eye failure, even heart failure. And yet the film, from newcomers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, is a winner.

This trippy, caustically funny road movie--a smash at last winter's Sundance Film Festival--is one of the brightest (and darkest) comedies to hit theaters in awhile.

From Michael Arndt's script, the film follows the beleaguered Hoover family, a seemingly hopeless wreck of geeks and losers who reluctantly get behind their one shred of hope--endearing, 7-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin)--when good news suddenly strikes. By default, this goofy, bespectacled girl has been chosen to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, Calif.

Since the Hoovers live in Albuquerque and have zip for money, that means a road trip is at hand, with everybody in the family climbing aboard the Hoover’s dilapidated Volkswagen bus, itself a rather sizeable metaphor for their broken relationships, and setting off for parts unknown--literally and figuratively.

At the wheel is patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear), a third-rate motivational speaker who has developed the nine-step program "Refuse to Lose," which is designed to turn losers into winners, though one wonders when Richard himself will start to see the benefits of his own work. He is a grinning mess, so tightly wound and relentlessly positive--except, of course, when he's shouting at his family--that you know the moment he finally comes undone, as he must in a movie like this, it won't go well. And so it doesn't.

There's Richard’s harried wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), the matriarch of the group, whose idea of dinner is chicken in a bucket served on paper plates. Nice touch. It’s tough to fault her, though, particularly since the film opens with Sheryl picking up her brother, Frank (Steve Carell), at the hospital after his failed suicide attempt.

A renowned Proust scholar, Frank slashed his wrists when he learned that his boyfriend had dumped him for another, much older Proust scholar. Since the hospital won't release him without supervision, Frank agrees to live with the Hoovers, the remaining two of whom include teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano), who hates his family and has taken a Nietzschean vow of silence, and Grandpa (Alan Arkin), who got kicked out of his retirement facility because he was hooked on heroin.

Dysfunction is a river that runs through "Little Miss Sunshine," but so do the characters' unexpected moments of humanity, caring and understanding, which keep the film from being the black comedy it otherwise might have been. The actors also serve that end, with Carell, Dano and the marvelous Breslin striking a comparatively calming balance against the manic heat provided by Collette, Kinnear and Arkin.

In the end, "Sunshine" embraces an increasingly manufactured, self-consciousness wackiness that strains believability, but since believability seems beyond the point when the point is buried in metaphor--much like their van, this clan continues to chug along in spite of so many stripped gears--it doesn’t harm the entertaining outcome, which is a free-wheeling blast.

Grade: B+