The bonds of family and searches for identity are well-worn subjects for independent films, but few take as sweetly funny a perspective on such sober topics as the new Fox Searchlight comedy “Little Miss Sunshine.”
A smash at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film follows one family’s long, strange journey to a youth beauty pageant in California.
Little Olive (adorable Abigail Breslin) idolizes the Miss America winners who smile and wave on the family television set, but she isn’t traditional pageant material. She’s pudgy, wears thick glasses and is something of an odd duck in the personality department. Yet when a diet pill scandal causes her region’s Little Miss Sunshine winner to forfeit her crown, runner-up Olive claims the title and wins a shot at the national competition in California.
And so “Little Miss Sunshine” hits its stride as a cramped road comedy full of absurd detours, unforeseen disasters and awkward interactions with mixed company. Along the way, Dad (Greg Kinnear) will commandeer a motorcycle, Frank (Steve Carell) will get caught with someone else’s pornographic magazine, a hilariously malfunctioning horn will lead to badly-timed legal trouble and the family van’s clutch will burn out, causing numerous push-starts and subsequent footraces to jump in as the vehicle speeds away.
The mechanics of the film’s comedy are well-oiled, but it’s the warmth of its characters’ flawed humanity that really makes it sail. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) may be a complete mess, for instance, but he dotes on Olive and always comes through in emotional crises. Perhaps the film’s most tender moment comes as he tucks Olive into bed one night on the road. She is worried she has no chance of winning the contest and will become one of the losers her father hates so much. Grandpa sums things up nicely: “You’re trying, right? Then you’re not a loser … you can tell ’em all to go to hell.”
Grandpa, like the other characters, comes off a little pre-fab in the beginning of the film, like more of a character sketch than a flesh and blood person. But the ensemble cast fleshes them out as time passes, adding shadings and dynamics that make them seem real. It helps, too, that directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have cast skilled comedians who trust in the script and characters without ever resorting to mugging or histrionics to slum for a laugh.
Not all of the comedy does work, however. Though the film captures middle-class details with pinpoint accuracy for the most part, right down to bucket chicken dinners and McDonald’s souvenir glasses, the script fumbles by throwing too much coincidence into the mix. Could a family barely getting by really afford to rent three hotel rooms? As it is, it just seems like a convenient way to pair off characters into their own scene groups. And once the family gets to the pageant, the film seems to summon venom for the cheese, creepy event that it cannot combat in any fresh way, simply a parade of tired jokes about synthetically preening tots, overly competitive adults and a lame, lecherous announcer.
Though the film is full of laughter, it has a somber core. An air of melancholy and yearning permeate from the beginning; the title card accompanies a shot of Carell, wrists freshly-bandaged, staring mournfully out of a hospital window. Each character is struggling with the idea that they’re failures; they need to be known, accepted and valued.
The characters’ search for something meaningful and better in life isn’t answered directly, but it does make them rediscover each other and realize that at least they’re on the endless search together. After a very dark turn midway through the film, Dad optimistically mumbles, “Whatever happens, we’re a family.”
Mychael Danna’s oddball score, co-composed by Colorado musicians DeVotchKa, keeps things in a minor key, complete with accordion and tuba, but with background strings that give just enough light at the end of the tunnel.
Tim Suhrstedt’s cinematography also reinforces the characters’ struggles with infinity and their small places within it, focusing on size and space relationships and on retreats from warm full light to cool half light.
Everything builds up to a riotous and oddly moving finale about having the conviction to march to your own drummer, even when it makes you look like a complete moron. With its skewed celebration of innocence, eccentricity and family perseverance, “Little Miss Sunshine” makes you belly laugh at things that would otherwise make you cry. It’s the rare comedy with a lot of things on its mind, from life to death to deciding for yourself what’s beautiful to, ultimately, whether or not it’s all relative in the end.
Sunshine.tif: The hilarious mishaps and misadventures of a family on its way to a beauty pageant are chronicled in Fox Searchlight’s “Little Miss Sunshine,” opening today in Starkville.
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Fox Searchlight
Rated R
STARRING:
Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Abigail Breslin, Paul Dano and Alan Arkin
THE VERDICT:
The film defeats its hackneyed independent film premise to deliver a sharp, witty, character-driven comedy with few drops in humor.
3 of 4 stars