Alternative Film Guide

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Directors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. Screenplay: Michael Arndt. Cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano

WANTED: RAINMAKER

More often than not, the term "independent film" merely indicates that an American production has received its financing from sources outside — or somewhere in the outskirts of — the Hollywood studio system. Only sporadically does the label "independent film" refer to edgy, challenging, and/or unconventional filmmaking.

Instead, "independent filmmakers" usually concoct storylines as conventional as those being churned out by the studios, probably in the hopes of selling their screenplays (or finished films) to a major distributor. Considering the amount of money involved, who can blame them? All they need is to wrap their films’ cliché-ridden core with the flimsiest veneer of quirkiness — always a good selling point for young audiences, film critics, and Oscar voters.

Those "independent" stories and characters don’t challenge anyone’s beliefs or prejudices; they only pretend to do so while subtly — or not so subtly — reaffirming the status quo. Audiences can then pat themselves on the back for having enjoyed something "artsy" even though they’ve actually been fed nothing more than a less expensive brand of the same pap big Hollywood studios give them on a regular basis. Little Miss Sunshine is a case in point.

Directed by husband-and-wife team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (music video directors making their feature-film début), from a screenplay by Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine proves once and for all that loving families can come in all sizes, shapes, and VW vans. In case you’re wondering, Have I seen this before? Well, except for the VW van bit, you most probably have. From My Man Godfrey, You Can’t Take It with You, and The Young in Heart to About a Boy, The Family Stone, and Transamerica, unusual — but ever-loving — families have been a film staple for decades.

Sometimes those family films work because their characters are not only unusual, but they are also masters of their fate. They don’t go down on their knees begging for our sympathy. Much more often than not, however, those family films don’t work because their characters want to be loved by me, you, everyone we know, and every stranger out there, too. "Love me!" they plead. "I may look and sound different, but at heart I’m just like you!"

In varying degrees, the please-love-me approach is taken by the assorted components of the Albuquerque, N.M., family who sets out to Los Angeles so the little daughter can take part in a beauty pageant.

Daddy (Greg Kinnear) is a success-obsessed professional failure — but he’s got that killer smile, so all’s forgiven; Mommy (Toni Collette) is a little angry, perhaps, but she overflows with love for her brood; Sonny (Paul Dano) is a silent Nietzschean freak who pretends to hate everybody but who’s actually a softie at heart; the little beauty queen wannabe (Abigail Breslin) wears glasses and has a (fake) tummy, but she is so goddamned Shirley Templenishly cute when eating chocolate ice cream you can’t help but love her; and Gramps (Alan Arkin) is loud, insensitive, and a heroin addict to boot — but he is gramps, so out of the kindness of his heart he finds enough energy while sober to give bits of life-affirming advice to his granddaughter.

Ah! There’s also Uncle Frank (Steve Carell). True, he’s gay, suicidal, and an intellectual (a Proust scholar, no less), but he’s also sexless and a total wimp. No red-blooded heterosexual male in the film — or in the audience, for that matter — has any reason to feel threatened by him.

And off they go to sunny California. (See synopsis.) Along the way, family members face terrible hardships ranging from color blindness and a stuck horn to sudden death and a bad carburetor. In the hands of inexperienced film directors Dayton and Faris, the dramatic sequences almost invariably fall into the trap of melodrama while most of the humorous moments feel mechanical and calculated. That said, screenwriter Michael Arndt bears the brunt of the blame for the insipid final product. (Either that, or the blame should be dumped square on the shoulders of the folks at Focus Films, who owned the rights to the material at one point, and who may have messed with the screenplay.) Even Arndt’s attempted jabs at the American obsession with winning and at beauty pageants for little girls — dressed like a cross between country Western singers and Sunset Boulevard streetwalkers — are as pointed as half-baked nudges.

Apart from two funny bits — when Arkin’s Gramps exclaims, "At my age, you’d be crazy not to [snort heroin]!" and when the little daughter performs a quite risqué striptease during her beauty-pageant moment of glory — everything in Little Miss Sunshine that could have been even slightly edgy (or subversive, if you wish) is watered down to be made as conventional as possible.

At the industry screening where I saw the film, Gramps got a big laugh when he told his adolescent grandson that he should fuck as many women as possible before settling down. Gee whiz, shocking! Now, imagine how many laughs Gramps would have gotten — or how sympathetic his heroin-addicted character would have seemed to mainstream audiences — had he also told his pre-teen granddaughter to fuck as many guys as possible before settling down. (It may sound odd, but heroin addicts have been known to do and say some really anti-social things.)

Even the uproarious child striptease (the girl had been coached by Gramps) is shamelessly softened by an outburst of familial love that feels as phony as it is clumsy (besides being a rip-off from a pivotal scene in About a Boy, which coincidentally also stars Toni Collette). See, those people may be "different" — losers all, including the little girl at this point — but we must care for them because they truly, madly, deeply love one another. And isn’t that exactly the way it is with every single family the world over?

The fact that Greg Kinnear manages to deliver a thoroughly believable performance as the befuddled patriarch is a testament to that underused actor’s talent. Paul Dano is equally good as the (silent) angry young man whose means of communication are scattered pieces of paper. Alan Arkin (his sensitive deaf-mute in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter remains one of my all-time favorite performances) might have been funnier had the veteran actor been given truly outrageous lines, but even Gramps had to get mushy. Steve Carell, for his part, makes an honorable attempt to turn his Uncle Frank into a human being but he’s painfully defeated by the script.

Much like the gay character (coincidentally played by Kinnear) in another well-received and highly popular film — the 1997 big-studio comedy As Good As It Gets — Uncle Frank is the perfect example of emasculated manhood, apparently the only type of "sympathetic" gay man (apart from total sissies) acceptable to mainstream American audiences. To say that such weak and sexless characters are condescending — Don’t hate me. I may be gay but I’m both un-sensual and unhappy — would be an understatement.

Like Kinnear’s gay amoeba, who can’t think of a response to Jack Nicholson’s character after being referred to as a "fag" (a line that got a big laugh in those days), Carell’s Uncle Frank quietly accepts Gramps’s suggestion that he buy himself a "fag rag" at a road stop. That line, by the way, also got a big laugh at the industry screening, something that made me wonder: Would those same people have laughed had Frank been Jewish and had Gramps told him to go buy himself a "kike rag"? What if Frank had been black, and Gramps had said, "Buy yourself a ‘nigger rag’"? Would that have been funny hah-hah or what? In those two cases, would Gramps have been merely "politically incorrect," or would he have come across as a bigoted asshole?

Either way, this writer found Gramps considerably more appealing than Uncle Frank. In fact, throughout the film I kept wondering why no one in such a loving family was kind enough to give the poor Uncle a pair of scissors — hell, a sharp razorblade would have worked — to help take that most spineless of gay men out of his misery. But since this is Little Miss Sunshine, Frank not only lives but also discovers he belongs to a family.

After Little Miss Sunshine was over — a family that loses together, stays together — the audience applauded enthusiastically. I left the theater praying for thunderstorms.

Synopsis:

The Hoovers, a quirky Arizona family, pile into their falling-apart VW van to go on a road trip to Los Angeles so the little daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), can take part in the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant for pre-teen females.

The Hoover patriarch, Richard (Greg Kinnear), is a failed motivational speaker desperately attempting to sell his nine-step program for success. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is none too happy with all the family issues she has to deal with.

Their son Dwayne (Paul Dano), for instance, is a Nietzschean freak who hates everybody, refuses to talk to anybody, and whose dream is to join the Air Force Academy. Olive, homely and sporting a big tummy, dreams of becoming a beauty queen. Sheryl’s brother, Frank (Steve Carell), is a downbeat gay Proust scholar, who has become suicidal after losing the man of his dreams and a major grant to his chief rival. And Richard’s father (Alan Arkin) is a foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting jerk.

Along the way to California, the Hoovers discover death, color blindness, the pleasures of chocolate ice cream, and a highway cop who enjoys straight (but not gay) porn.

After the beauty competition is over — Olive causes a furor with her highly suggestive striptease — the Hoovers realize that winning is not everything. Family bonds are truly all that matters…

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE - Awards and Nominations

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SIDEWAYS

BEING JULIA

THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR

ALFIE

ALEXANDER

THE BLACK DAHLIA

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